


[far from here we are alright]

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: [to see you there] [8]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bruce Banner Has Issues, Clint Barton Has Issues, Everyone Has Issues, Gen, Natalia Romanova has Issues, Post-Battle of New York, aftermath of mind control, bring back Betty Ross, idiosyncratic relationships, rewrite of an earlier version of this fic, the Avengers as a functional social-emotional unit, the odd friendship of Natalia Romanova and Anthony Edward Stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2016-12-28
Packaged: 2018-09-12 23:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9094588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: The corner of Tasha's mouth twitches, but she finally leans back and stops looking like she's trying to burn holes in the plasma screens with the power of her brain. "Yes," she says. "It's Dr Ross."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Rewrite of the previous 2012 version of the fic. I've put more detailed discussion of said in the end notes. 
> 
> This particular rewrite dedicated to gen-is-gone for consistent success at managing to share ~*feelings*~ about these imaginary people right at the moment I'm probably contemplating giving it all up and becoming an accountant. (I would be a terrible accountant.)

The morning after what consensus eventually calls The Battle of New York, SHIELD does not call - not Nat's cell, not Clint's, and not the townhouse landline. Which at least shows that the disaster hasn't made everyone fucking stupid, even with the loss of - 

But there, half-awake, Clint shuts the thought down and gently puts it on a shelf to have later. At this point in his life, he's lost enough people to know how grief works, and how to keep the damage to a minimum. It's something he's generally kept to himself, because most people find it cold, but it's not. It's like working a damaged joint back into shape: it's going to hurt, there's nothing you can do about that, and it'll get bumped and jarred when you're not expecting it by normal life and there's not much you can do about that either, but if you know what you're doing, you can handle the rest of it. Know when it can take weight and when it can't, when what you're doing is making things better and when it'll make things worse. 

Right now, it'll make things worse, like trying to put your weight on a dislocated knee. Enough other shit hurts, mind and body, that Clint doesn't need to be stupid on top of it. Coulson's dead, and the new-found realities of intergalactic politics (or what the fuck ever) mean Clint can't actually shoot Loki in the eye for it, and those are the facts; he'll deal with the rest of it after he's taken a lot of painkillers, caught up on some fucking sleep, and figured out how badly everything else is going to hit him in the head. 

Clint's not stupid enough to think the shit from that night that started to eat away at him like he was bathing in acid is actually gone. Before he drank himself to sleep there was shit starting to stick to him he hasn't thought about or felt since he was a teenager, stuff that's been comfortably settled and now really isn't, and he's not going to fool himself that its going to be a vodka binge and a couple days and then boom, all fixed. 

But that's trouble for later, too. In fact for now he'll start with the come-down off the amphetamines he's been running on for the last two days, the bruises he's fucking covered with, the absolute shit he'd been eating on the purest "food as fuel" regimen of his life, and how pissed off his entire meatsack of a corpse is at him for all of it. 

That'll be fine. The rest of it can wait. 

 

Tasha has more or less the same idea, and they spend most of the next day moving fitfully between sleeping, painkillers and forcing something like healthy food down their throats, mostly in the form of shit like smoothies and shit measured out and forced down without really tasting it, mechanically moving through food as medication for the body before taking more painkillers and going back to sleep. 

At various points Tasha puts on soft, wordless music Clint doesn't care enough to identify. That's fine. He also catches her watching him, expressionless, and more than once. 

That's less fine, but he can't deal with that right now. So he ignores it. 

Around late afternoon there's a text from Hill on both their phones saying debrief is that time the next day, and is apparently to be followed by that fucking bastard being released into Thor's custody and Thor using the Tesseract's wacky space magic to go home. Clint stares at it, determines he can probably handle debrief tomorrow, decides that trying to actually encompass and comprehend wacky space magic yet is fucking beyond him, texts back an acknowledgement and goes back to sleep. 

There's one more round of drugs, blended fruit-and-veggie mush with protein powder, and stupid amounts of water, before he falls asleep through the night. He tries not to think about how he knows it's just the amphetamine withdrawal and that won't last, and then he's pretty sure what's going to happen to his sleep. Tries just to enjoy the fact that it's easy now. 

It's eight in the morning when he wakes up. 

He's awake because there's sun in his eyes; there's worse reasons. Tasha's already up, as evidenced by the lack of her in the bed. 

That's one of the nice things about Tasha's bolt-holes. With anyone else - really anyone else, he's tested it, though often not on purpose - he'd've woken up when she so much as started to move. Would have needed to be awake if anyone around him was, and sometimes his subconscious ability to figure out someone's awake creeps _him_ out. 

He doesn't have to do that at Tasha's (or, to be fair, if she's at one of his). Because when it comes down to it she's even more paranoid than he is, which is both pathological and incredibly reassuring. Any paranoia he could bring to the table would be redundant, so he can relax a little; at the same time, he knows her signals as well as any he's made up himself, so if she needs him awake he'll be awake. Makes it easier to sleep deep enough to get the benefit. 

For some reason, the SHIELD psychs are never pleased with the answer _anything that can get past Natasha's guard would get past mine and I'd be dead anyway_ , even the ones who should know better. They keep saying that it isn't healthy. Clint thinks it's more healthy than being so paranoid that Natasha's paranoia is insufficient. He doesn't think a human being could actually function at that level. But the comfort of Tasha's paranoia means that he can sleep through her moving around. If she needs him, he'll know, and anything that can get past her guard _would_ get past his. So his vigilance at this point _is_ redundant. 

It's nice when you figure this shit out. 

The smell of coffee makes itself very definitely known - hell, it's probably what woke him up - reminding him he hasn't had any for . . . days, not since the fucking Tesseract started acting up. Another part of him reminds him that he's been trying to quit caffeine again, and that he damn well knows it's bad for him and he shouldn't reinforce the habit, but he tells that part to shut the fuck up. He just fought off demon space whales after being mind-controlled by some spiteful alien fuckhead. He can have coffee if he wants. 

Clint contemplates the cost-benefit ratio of pain versus fresh coffee that (and this is important) _he doesn't have to make_ , and comes down on the side of needing to get up soon anyway, so it might as well be now. It's a slow process - well, for him it is - but eventually he's up, through the bathroom and wincing his way down the stairs.

There's no teapot or kettle and definitely no makeshift samovar replacement. Normally Clint would needle Tasha a little bit about drinking coffee instead of the incredibly sweet concoction of paint-stripping zavarka, nowhere near enough hot water, milk, honey and jam she calls "tea", but he's gonna leave it alone today. Tea's comforting; she's probably not ready to be comforted yet. Secure, maybe. But not comforted. 

So he just pours himself his coffee, digs a breakfast bar out of a cupboard, and wanders out into the sitting room where he's pretty sure she'll be. 

Nat's parked in front of her computer screens, mug in hand and concentration drawing a deep line between eyebrows, watching some kind of recording on one of the monitors while the others run the surveillance cameras. As he rips the breakfast bar's packaging open, Clint comes to look over her shoulder. 

The big green guy rampages his way across the screen again, but it's old footage, not new: it's Virginia and Harlem. Though to be fair, those are no less really fucking impressive even _after_ you've seen the Hulk swat Chitauri and their horrible flying bikes out of the air and stop evil demon space-whales from hell with one hand. If anything, having seen the latter just makes the old footage just sort of . . . _more_ on every level, knowing what kind of power _still_ hasn't even shown itself as he throws the thing Emil Blonksy turned into around the streets. 

Tasha's got different windows open for different angles, playing them all at once. Clint watches the video for a while, mug in hand. Then he takes in the tension in Tasha's shoulders and the frown-line and her absolutely intent expression, adds it to the footage, turns it over in his head, and comes to a conclusion that is the exact opposite of a shot in the dark. 

"That why you were favouring that leg when you kicked my ass?" he asks, keeping his tone light. He has an excuse: it is kind of funny that of all the shit from the last few days, and given she deliberately concussed him about thirty seconds later, he can remember that part as clearly as he can. 

"Yes," Tasha replies, in the voice that says _not now, Barton._ He accepts the not-quite-rebuke and goes back to drinking his coffee and watching over her shoulder. 

After a minute or two, the line between her eyebrows gets deeper and she starts selecting specific areas of each window. She zooms right in on those, and cuts the rest of the videos away. Some of them pixelate, some don't, depending on the quality of the footage. As Clint watches, curious, Nat clicks through all of them, then closes a couple of the windows and then pulls three of the best ones into the centre of the screen, on top of the others. 

"Look at this," she says, before he can ask. "Tell me if you're seeing what I see."

Clint decides it's going to help absolutely nobody if he points out that this would be easier if she told him what she sees first, because then he could make his incredibly fucking abused brain look for something in particular. Instead, as the videos loop, he watches each one through at least twice. 

And okay: he does see what she sees. And he can see the point of not telling him, just to see if what she sees is as obvious as she thinks it is - and it is. 

"Is that Dr Ross?" he asks, gesturing to the dark-haired woman on screen who seems to have either a really intense a death-wish or severe delusions of invulnerability. Or both. 

Actually she just looks fucking insane, over and over again. Christ. 

Clint is totally aware that without the Hulk they'd all be dead, and absolutely full of gratitude they didn't have to be sans huge green invulnerable monster, but that doesn't make it less stupid to run out into the middle of what amounts to a damn battlefield to go talk to it when it's more with the _out-of-its-damn-mind rampage_ and less with a kind of "appears to basically understand language and grasp who's friend and who's foe and prefers to smash foe" sanity.

"I didn't know you read the file," Tasha says absently, opening another document that spreads itself across one of the other monitors.

Clint gives her a slightly affronted look. It's to the back of her head, but she'll still hear it in his tone. "Of course I read the file," he says. "Since when have I not read files? And if you say Kabul I'm not talking to you for the rest of the day."

"You _didn't_ read the file for Kabul," she points out, mildly. It's a pretty good sign. She'll stop giving him shit for Kabul when she dies, he dies, or occasionally when there's actually something more important going on. 

"I was _busy_ ," Clint says sourly. "And I'm serious. The rest of the day." 

The corner of Tasha's mouth twitches, but she finally leans back and stops looking like she's trying to burn holes in the plasma screens with the power of her brain. "Yes," she says. "It's Dr Ross." 

Something in the very very back of his head sort of . . . echoes: Ross, finding Ross, assessing Ross's location, flat rejection of . . .reasons it wasn't a good idea to . . . and then he shakes it off, hard. Tries to pretend there wasn't anything at all, even to himself. 

Hey, maybe it'll work. 

Lets his brain leap ahead instead, focused on the here and on the now and on Tasha and this room. Shoves it ahead, in fact, so that things go click-click-click even though he's still tired and mentally worn out. 

"And now you want to go find her and recruit her," he says, just to get it out in the air that they can skip the next two minutes of this conversation. 

"Of course I do," she retorts, in a way that is absolutely and definitely not in any respect defensive. She looks around for her coffee; since it's slightly out of arms' reach (she must've been working on one of the other monitors before) Clint snags it and pulls it over so that she doesn't have to stretch her bad shoulder. 

It's one of the many things to admire about Nat, really, while also being aware that it's the product of unbelievable (at least by normal people) levels of paranoia: no matter who or what she runs into, she _will_ find a way to neutralize them. It might take her a long time, or extraordinary measures, and "neutralize" might be something she's willing to do only in the absolute worst of circumstances, but she'll still find it. 

And she's smart enough to know that "neutralize" doesn't mean "kill, incapacitate, or capture." 

Then after what almost sounds like a hesitation, Nat says, "Depending on how you define _recruit_." She glances at Clint and shrugs with her better shoulder. "Elizabeth Ross - actually," she says like she's correcting herself, "she might sign on with SHIELD, just to get a handle on where Banner is and what's happening to him. But she'll never trust us. And her on the inside, not trusting us . . . " 

"Bad idea?" Clint fills in, just to be sure. 

"We've had worse," she says, meaning SHIELD in general, "but not many. On the other hand - you read the file. It's _her_ work that means Banner is how he is, instead of either dead or as fucked up as Blonksy. I looked up a bunch of her publications this morning. Having access to her as an asset would be incredibly valuable, and right now, we don't." 

She sighs and sips her coffee. "Right now, we have _no_ relationship with her, and Thunderbolt fucking Ross'll block us if we try to make one, the public way." 

"So be nice to my fucking concussion and fill me in on the rest of this?" Clint asks, not seeing where she's going with this. 

"I'm going to dangle Banner's location in front of her, and then dangle her in front of Stark," Tasha says. "Stark doesn't want Banner to leave, and she's not going to be willing to leave Banner, so Stark'll throw money and lab-access at her. If she's working for Pepper she's accessible if we need her." 

Clint can see so, so many ways that could go horribly wrong. He's also pretty sure he's still missing a couple of connections, mostly having to do with how in the name of almighty fuck introducing someone to Stark is going to get them to stay anywhere near him, or help, and also why Tasha's apparently pretty sure Banner won't lose his shit over this. 

On the other hand, Tasha's one of literally two people who are - who have ever been any good at calling what Stark's going to do or how he's going to react, and between Tasha and Coulson, she's been better at it. And that's on top of her normal way with people. And it might've scared the crap out of her, but she did _get_ Banner to come in, so - 

Clint's sure not going to argue with her assessment, given that, especially not two days after a concussion and fuck knows what before it. 

"Think Fury'll go for it?" is what he asks, instead, because life's no fun when you're not pushing boundaries and besides, it's an honest question. 

"Does the pope shit in the woods?" Tasha replies. She shrugs. "He's not going to _like_ it, but short of Stark turning into his father in miniature and suddenly becoming his father's biggest fan, Nick's not going to like anything Stark does. Not entirely." 

She sighs. A little more tension releases from just about her entire body, like running it all by Clint out-loud was a kind of key in a mental lock. She starts rubbing her bad shoulder, and she doesn't jump at all when Clint brushes her hand away and digs his fingers into the spot. Which is a good sign. 

"We got debrief tomorrow anyway," he points out.

*****

They more or less do nothing the rest of the day. Natalia's pretty sure that Medical would tell them to do more or less nothing for at least a month, more or less, but that's not going to happen - if anything, Natalia's going to run the Ross thing by Fury _now_ because it's low-risk, low-physicality and the last thing either of them (but especially Clint) needs is to do nothing but endless debriefs and rest right now. Something to _do_ is a better idea, and honestly sweet-talking Ross and setting Stark up to give her endless funding for whatever she wants to do now . . .well it's probably a lot lower-risk than her other option, which is dropping into some long-running covers and shoring them back up.

Clint doesn't need to be living someone else right now. He just also doesn't need to . . .dwell. And if the choice were between just those options, she'll take pretending to be someone else. This gives her a third. 

It's honestly a miracle neither of them has any broken bones, enough so that Natalia makes Clint let her check his ribs because she can't quite believe it. "Nice leap off the building, by the way," she says, as she does. 

"Thanks," he says, the sibilant hissing a bit as she prods at his side experimentally. "I'm glad you liked it. Next time we fight off an alien army, remind me to pack a whole fuck of a lot more shafts. And maybe a hydrogen bomb." 

Natalia awards him a small smile for that, even though it's a pretty thin joke. Then, having determined that his ribs really are just bruised, and also that her head is starting to _hurt_ and so is her upper back, she gives up and lets herself fall back on the couch, to lean on his good side. He leans his head against the top of hers and they both stare into space like that for a while.

She knows the question is coming. She figures he's trying to sort out how to word it, to keep it from hurting either him or her. He'll figure out that's impossible pretty quick, but she doesn't really have anything better to do than sit here and stare and try to unfuck her own head, so she's willing to wait.

It's anger, mostly. For her it's mostly anger with a thread of the kind of resentment that comes from something offending the fuck out of you. It's injury _and_ insult, and just because she knows that for a _hundred reasons_ the best solution really is going to be letting Thor take the pissant little piece of shit back to Asgard, knows that it's for the best both diplomatically and pragmatically - 

\- doesn't stop her from wishing she could rip his fucking guts out first. 

No metaphor intended. 

The would-be-god thought he could frighten her, and that's insulting. She has fears, but they aren't anything someone like him could grasp at. The little piece of shit couldn't frighten her - but he could make her angry, did make her angry, and she hates him having even that much power. The mission is over, the problem is solved, she solved a satisfyingly large part of it, but instead of the satisfaction she should have, she's still angry as hell. Because it wasn't _prudent_ for her to rip him to pieces or flay him alive. 

She hates being compromised. 

"If I ask you how long it takes before I stop wondering if he's really gone, if it's really just me in here," Clint says, finally, carefully, like the words are a dangerous wild animal he's holding at arms' length, "you're going to tell me you don't know, aren't you."

And there's the question. Not even a bad shot at the wording. "I'm going on - well," she sighs, "you know how many years." 

She doesn't like to think about how many years. It's another thing to trip the inconvenient, uncomfortable anger that she doesn't really have time for.

"Fuck," he says, and you wouldn't know how hard he's having to work to keep it light if you didn't know him. Natalia does. "I was hoping I was wrong."

"When was the last time you were wrong about me?" she asks, and she manages some tired amusement, at least. And it's also a fucking fair question. He's reserved _judgement_ , but Clint Barton's fucking eerie ability to figure her out was one of the first things about him that stuck, and it's still going. She relies on it now, instead of feeling like it's a bottle full of nitroglycerin hanging over marble floor of her life, and on a thin rope, but that's the only change. 

"Uh," Clint replies, like she's managed to derail him a little at least. And like he's having to think. "I brought you the wrong kind of latte last September?"

"I can't believe you remember that," she says. Granted, he had, but he'd also been on enough morphine that he shouldn't've been going anywhere to get anything. "I can't believe you remember _anything_ about those two days." 

"I don't," Clint admits. "Coulson told me." And Natalia shakes her head. She carefully wraps up the faint ache the name puts in her chest and puts it aside. It's something for later. And a little at a time. 

"So when was the last time I've been wrong about you?" she asks, and she gets silence. 

She knows he knows the gambit she's using. She knows he knows she's backing him into a corner, over a train of thought that only has one terminus. He should: he's used it on her often enough. And it doesn't matter: knowing it, and having it make any difference - those are two different things. 

"I can't remember," he admits, guardedly. It's a compromise. 

"I know it's just you in there," she says, quietly. Then she adds something she doesn't think he'll see coming. "I know you were never gone. Not completely." 

Clint goes still. Natalia waits, counting heartbeats instead of seconds, until he says, "Explain," his voice flattened out but still not loud. 

She pushes herself up so she can give him a level look. 

"The fuck you don't know Nick _always_ wears body-armour," Natalia tells him. "And the _fuck_ you couldn't put a bullet between his eyes at that distance." 

Clint stares at her, expressionless except for the faintest signs she knows, and knows are the signs he's trying to slot that into place. Natalia pulls her legs up onto the couch and turns so she's facing him, arms folded, leaning against the couch. 

"There's always something," she says, quietly. "And it's always fighting as hard as it fucking can. And that might not get very far," she notes, just to head off that line of potential self-abuse, "because it's fighting the equivalent of a fucking tide, but that doesn't mean it's not there. Doing what it can."

She shrugs. "Selvig left a flaw in the machine he could've taken out. You shot Fury centre of mass." And Natalia knows this smile isn't going to manage to get to her eyes, but she smiles it anyway. "I'm here." 

Clint blinks and looks down, his expressionless flatness creasing into a frown. "There's always something left," she tells him. "If you're alive, there's always something still there. There's always a way back." 

They both know they're out onto shaky ground, right out onto the things she has to keep telling herself and making herself believe, because otherwise it all falls apart. It's a bit of a gamble, but it's a calculated one - Barton might take acid and pick-axes to the foundations of his own sanity even though he knows better, but she's pretty secure in knowing he won't do it to hers. 

As sure as she is of anything. 

Clint looks at her again, jaw tight. Then he takes a breath like he's trying to clean himself out and says, "Well I'm glad you're confident." And it's not _quite_ sarcastic. 

"I'm good at what I do, you idiot," she retorts. Doesn't point out that if she starts doubting herself, doubting she knows how to read people like they really do write everything they feel on their foreheads, she'll finish going crazy and someone will have to put her down. 

There's always a limit you can't go beyond. Not because there's nothing beyond it, but because the last of what makes up _you_ gives up and gives out. 

The silence stretches longer this time; when Clint speaks again he's putting that subject firmly aside, because he asks, "You really think Ross can work as Banner's failsafe?"

"I think it's worth trying."

They lapse into silence for the last time before both of them manage to fall asleep, in probably the worst possible positions given the shit they just put their bodies through. But that happens a lot. When it comes down to the bare bones, they're both bad at sleeping in beds.

*****

Fury brings up a few token objections to the plan, and makes a production over how unhappy he is about it. But they're really tokens, even the production, and he's mostly dropped them by the time Tasha's running the actual logistics of her plan by him.

He finishes by pointing out that General Ross probably won't like it. 

Natasha in turn points out that General Ross is an idiot who made a mess into a catastrophe because he was too much of a mewling coward to take his hits and decided saving his career and prestige was more important than dealing with unwanted consequences, so General Ross can stick his head up his ass for all she cares.

This is slightly less professional than Tasha usually is, Clint thinks, but then again, they've all been under stress. You can tell, because Fury's not doing very good at actually hiding his smile. 

Fury just says, "As far as I'm aware, Dr Ross feels the same way." He leans back in his chair. "Good luck."


	2. Chapter 2

If you take everything together, consider it all in a lump, Betty knows she's pretty good at people. She's pretty good at reading them, and pretty good at handling them, and in general, she's pretty good at them. 

It's not a natural talent, and it doesn't exactly come from happy places. She's spent a lot of time trying to get rid of the tics and twitches that come with it, without just going so far as to replace them with the fury and aggression that just about nobody ever believes is bubbling that close to the surface. 

Bruce helped her with that. Helped a lot. Enough that even Leonard had been a little surprised when she'd snapped and taken a strip off the condescending son-of-a-bitch car-salesman who'd actually _done_ that thing where he talked to Leonard through the whole ten minutes they were there, despite it being Betty who was going to buy the car. 

Not shocked, Leonard had said, but a bit surprised. When she'd pressed him on that, he'd admitted that the surprise was mostly that he hadn't expected her to have access to that kind of anger, in anything less than a totally uncontrolled explosion, and especially not for her to also be able to rein it back in, calm herself down, and be merely aggravated by the time they were at the next car-lot.

Betty hadn't talked much about her father with Leonard. Hadn't let him into most of the mess. In retrospect that was a mistake, but it's still raw - it'll always be raw - and she'd had enough rawness at that point to last her a lifetime and the entire point of dating Leonard had been doing something good that was totally new: no history, no baggage, just here and now. 

Then Bruce had walked down the stairs at the pizzeria and that ended that. 

Betty didn't actually blame Leonard for calling her father. If she'd just watched _her_ girlfriend - well, boyfriend - run out into a back alley shouting someone's name, and then had him abandon her without the slightest explanation at a closed pizzeria to screech off down the street after the guy in a downpour, and it turned out the guy was an international fugitive who'd nearly killed said boyfriend before . . . 

And most importantly, if she'd just watched all that, and found out all of that, and _didn't_ know any of the hundreds of reasons to hesitate calling said boyfriend's parent even if said boyfriend had just been hit by a bus?

Well. She'd've called, too. 

Leonard had apologized; Betty'd apologized for dumping him at Stan's without a word. Then Leonard had looked at her for a few seconds of hesitation and concern before he'd leaned forward with what she'd teasingly labelled his Therapist Face, and said, _Betty - you know your father's a lying, narcissistic bully, right?_

It wasn't anything Betty expected out of Leonard's Therapist Face - that mostly came for gentle, roundabout conversations that were about broaching possibilities without pressure - and all she'd been able to do was burst into slightly shrill laughter for at least a few minutes. 

When she'd managed to catch any of her breath, she'd replied, _And that only took you one conversation!_ in her brightest, wriest voice. 

_Oh I can go farther_ , Leonard had said. He mostly looked relieved that he wasn't going to have to walk her through the basics of realizing her father was a terrible human being. _Trust me._

Because that's the thing: Betty's pretty good at people. Leonard, though, is superlative. More than anyone expects him to be. 

( _It's my face,_ he'd said to her once, half-joking and half-not. _I have a narcissist's face. Everyone expects an ego black hole with a few orbiting grudges. I've learned to live with it._ ) 

She'd learned a lot from Leonard, because she'd paid attention. Still pays attention, in fact, as much as she can. So she's pretty good at people, and she's gotten even better. That's why it's kind of terrifying that Talia Richter doesn't even show up on her radar for over two months. 

That whole time, girl just does office-work, is quiet and a little shy, wears modest clothing and flats, and only catches Betty's eye a couple times - mostly when Betty gets short with a couple of the PhD students (both young men) for moving past "asking a favour" of the small department office staff through "taking flagrant advantage" and even broaching on "being goddamn assholes", because Miss Richter is so willing to be accommodating. 

_I don't care if she says she doesn't mind,_ she'd snapped at one of them, who seemed as absolutely stunned as everyone does the first time she snapped at them. _Unless you want me to figure out how to garnish your stipend for the time-and-a-half overtime she's been putting in to do your scut-work,_ and _the retroactive penalty for not having done so before now, you will stop making inappropriate requests of the office staff and you will handle your own work, and if you cannot do so you will put on your big boy panties and address the overload with the department_ yourself _, have I made myself clear?_

She'd got a chorus of _Yes, Dr Ross_ from faces that said they didn't know how else to end the moment, and then she'd gone on to her office, to send both their supervisors an email, including a note about how if this was because _they_ were misusing their post-grads, she would find a way to make them suffer. 

Except in polite, office-appropriate language that no lawyer could actually interpret as a threat. Betty's good at those. 

For a little more than two months, though, that's the only thing the girl shows at all, until the Saturday evening that Betty walks into her office to discover the person she's known as Talia Richter waiting for her. 

And everything, from the way she sits in the chair to the angle of her head to the way one leg is crossed over the other to hands resting in her lap to the tiny nuances of expression in the skin and muscles around her eyes . . . everything telling Betty that this is _not_ a "girl" by any stretch of the definition or imagination, that "Talia Richter" is a complete lie, that whoever this woman is she is _good_ at complete lies - and finally, that the woman isn't trying to hide any of this, right now. 

If anything, she _wants_ Betty to read it. Being any more obvious would get cartoonish. 

Betty stays still in the doorway for a second or two. Then she closes the file she'd been reading as she walked through the halls, straightening as she does so. She also takes the weight off her right foot without being obvious about it, and moves no further from the open door. 

Hallway, corner, fire-doors: the alarm is there on the wall, and that brings security. Betty runs through the route in her head. As long as she's not already a dead woman walking, she can get to the door to the small auditorium, and it's thick wood with a very solid deadbolt. And she has five people that she knows of less than a few metres away, in labs and offices. 

She says, very calmly, "If you have _any_ association with my father, at all, I'm going to scream right here and right now, and I don't care about the consequences." 

_Including you shooting me_ is the bit she leaves unsaid. She doesn't think the woman has a gun, though. Talia might be a fiction, but the woman's still in Talia's basic sort of costume, and it's not convenient for hiding a concealed carry. Could be quite a few knives, though. 

It bothers Betty that she knows this now, but on the other hand, after Harlem, it had bothered her more when she didn't know. When every time she looked around she had to _wonder_ about these things. She'd relented on speaking to her father ever again, but that didn't mean she trusted him. 

Or the people he'd get involved with, so absolutely damned sure he could outsmart them. 

The woman in her office smiles a rapid, thin kind of smile. "No, Dr Ross," she says, in a voice as different from Talia's as could be while still coming from the same set of vocal chords. "I have absolutely nothing to do with Military Intelligence in general, or General Ross in particular." She pauses. "Except irritating him whenever I have the chance." 

A little light-headedly, Betty thinks that sounds promising. Not that she's going to relax any time soon. 

"Who are you from?" she demands. She couldn't pin down why, but she's already mentally moved "you're a dead woman walking, Elizabeth Ross" several steps up the mental flag-pole of options, if this is the opening of hostilities. "And who are you?" 

She puts the file down on the nearest small table, on the basis that there are many more useful things to throw if she needs to and it'll be easier to do that if she has empty hands. Not that it'll probably help, but at least she'll die trying. If that's where this is going. 

Betty's not really sure how this is her life. 

"You can call me Natasha Romanoff," the fake intern says, all composure. "I'm an agent with Strategic Homeland Intervention Enforcement and Logistics Division."

Acronyms aren't hard for someone who grew up with a military father and then went into Betty's particular line of work. Besides, she's familiar with the acronym, if not immediately familiar with the full (kind of ridiculous) name, so it doesn't take much to prompt her. 

"SHIELD," she finishes, almost before Romanoff gets done with the word _division_. That's not actually reassuring, or shouldn't be. Betty knows damn well that SHIELD makes the NSA look like a model of cooperative transparency, and the CIA look like the ACLU and even apart from anything to do with the General, in her field she's heard of more than one scientist hitting either the brick wall of SHIELD interdiction, or in one case falling into the black hole of SHIELD involvement. 

Maybe not to the point of "never be heard of again", but trying to get ahold of Erik Selvig these days is like trying to get ahold of - 

Betty doesn't even know. It's hard, anyway. 

So finding out she's got a SHIELD undercover agent in her office shouldn't be something that makes her happy, but a second thought jolts through Betty's brain like a lightning strike in a bad monster movie, so that she steps the rest of the way inside, closes the door and locks it. 

Sometimes she really has no common sense. She has to admit that. 

"You know where Bruce is," she says. 

Between closing the door and the direct, unequivocal statement, Betty's pretty sure she's managed to startle the agent. She thinks the woman even blinks once more than necessary before answering, "And have done since the incident in Harlem," without seeming to otherwise miss a beat. Because this woman is good. 

"Is that a technical term?" The question gets out before Betty can remind herself that she probably won't gain anything by being antagonistic, no matter how much her whole head is buzzing. "'Incident'?" 

Then she forces herself to take a breath, to count to ten, to do all the stupid things you're supposed to do in order to calm down. If nothing else it's _extremely_ unlikely this agent had anything to do with any of the decisions Betty now wants to do things that are actually against her own personal ethics to, and if it turns out later that she did, Betty can always go after her later. 

That's one of those thoughts most people don't think she has. But she has them quite a lot. 

Another thin smile and Romanoff says, "Yes, actually. Along with a comparative designation of severity, on a numerical scale. That one ranked fairly high."

"No shit," is all Betty can think to say. When she blinks there's fire behind her eyes, and she remembers - she remembers a lot of things, most of them terrifying. Moment after moment after moment of being absolutely sure this was the moment she was going to die, only to survive long enough to meet the next moment of certainty. 

Terror and fury and the hollow ache of devastation behind her chest and then being left there in the wreckage stinking of smoke and whatever the hell Emil Blonksy'd turned into and dead bodies and what dead bodies do right when they die, and then the cavalry arriving two days late and a million dollars short, as far as Betty was concerned. Is concerned. 

That's actually where the crystal-clear etchings of adrenaline-fuelled flawless memory give way to the blur and mush of shock, and Betty doesn't really remember who the cavalry were. They might even have _been_ SHIELD, at least some of them, for all she knows. 

It's . . .easier to get caught in that part of her head again. Leonard says that given New York, it's not surprising, and there's nothing much to do about it except be patient and careful and do all the things she does anyway or did before. 

And now this woman - 

Betty gives up and crosses the room, sits down in the chair across from Romanoff and says, "Where is he?"

Again, she thinks the direct question isn't what Romanoff expects. "You've seen footage of the attack in New York?" Romanoff replies, deflecting slightly.

Betty's momentarily distracted by grim amusement, her mind bouncing around like a tiny caffeinated child, like it always does in moments of stress, running seven different trains of thought that like to crash into each other. 

"That one's not an 'incident'?" she asks, but the edge misses Romanoff entirely - or else she just doesn't feel it. Actually probably the latter. This woman probably doesn't miss much. 

"No," she replies. "That one is definitely an _attack_. I hear they're considering upgrading it to 'battle'." 

Now it's Betty who's surprised, even given the agent's comment about annoying the General earlier on. The amusement's kind of grim, but it's also kind of . . .playful. And like she's inviting Betty to join her in mild exasperation for how the bureaucrat end of these things likes having all its little classification schemes and having them rigidly respected. 

"But if it helps," the agent adds, "we had several incidents leading up to it. Dr Banner is currently resident in Stark Tower," the agent goes on before Betty can ask again. "At the invitation of the owners." 

Betty stares at her. If you asked her for a list of things she didn't expect, a straight, simple and accurate answer should be at the top of that list, and even when it's happened, she has difficulty believing it did. But it did. 

Bruce was in New York. A few hours - okay, a little over eight hours -flight away. Not even a border crossing. In downtown fucking Manhattan. She could _kill_ him right now. 

"I believe he eventually intends to wander off the grid again," Agent Romanoff adds. Betty doesn't believe for a second the agent is oblivious to how hard Betty just metaphorically landed on her ass, but she's not letting any reaction to it show. "But Mr Stark keeps distracting him with new toys."

"I bet," Betty says, and one of the competing trains of thought is suddenly wistful for the idea of what she could do with the kind of resources Stark Tower would offer, assuming its owner liked her. 

Working at a smaller institution meant she could disappear off the world's radar a bit, but it did make for a certain amount of wrangling over the budget. 

The thought fights for space, and then evaporates in the face of wariness and worry, lead by the angrier cousin of curiosity, which are also currently managing to win over her desire to throw things and scream. 

"Why are you here?" Betty asks. It sort of covers everything. 

"SHIELD would like to relocate you to New York," the agent says. Betty doesn't actually believe that's what she just heard, so she has to ask Romanoff to repeat it. 

Romanoff repeats the exact same sentence. Betty stares at her. 

"To work for you," she says, more for herself than for Romanoff. 

"We would like you to be available for consultation and involvement as needed," Romanoff replies, and Betty's mind fumbles at the rewording. "Bluntly, Dr Ross, we just got attacked by an alien army, using bio-integrated weaponry and tech, and we're barely even beginning to get a grasp of what else might be out there. Your record of innovation actually speaks for itself, and probably saved this planet at the time, but at this point, working with smaller institutions on simple projects and verification - you're behind the edge of innovation. We need you not to be." 

Betty tries to sort out the meanings behind all that, behind the implication that she wouldn't be working _for_ SHIELD she'd just be . . .around? Where? At some other laboratory? Was Romanoff implying SHIELD wanted to _place_ Betty at Stark Tower - 

Then, as the thoughts refuse to line up, a much bigger, much louder one cuts them all off and Betty realizes _she doesn't fucking care_ , and in the space for the breath Romanoff's taking with the clear intent to keep going, Betty says, "Yes." 

It's flat, it's short, it's level. It's the only answer she has. It's the _yes_ that goes along with the internal _no_ that goes to that big, obliterating question in her thoughts: 

_What are you going to do, Elizabeth? Say 'no', stay here, and go back to nannying thoughtless students and double-checking someone else's stem-cell findings? Seriously?_

Romanoff takes the redirect smoothly, but starts with, "You should be aware of the risks - " 

Betty cuts her off. This, this she _has_ been thinking about, off and on. It goes right down very familiar paths. They started as she stood in the cafe, the suddenly silent cafe, with sixty other people - patrons and people crowding in off the street - to stare at the TV screen on one wall with the volume turned up as loud as it could go.

Watched shapes pour out of a hole in the sky, and - eventually, among other things - a green shape that seemed so incredibly tiny rocketing back up the side of buildings to meet them. Knowing that was Bruce. 

Knowing that somebody found him.

"How do they stack up against the risks of being collateral damage in an alien invasion, or otherwise-triggered advanced technological warfare?" she asks, bluntly. " _Especially_ as the only person in the world who has a hope in hell of recreating the . . . process . . .that made Bruce . . . the way he is?" 

She ignores her own little stuttering pauses. She hates that they're there, so she's not going to dignify them by paying attention.

Now Romanoff does stare. She just outright stares. It's not an unguarded reaction _exactly_ because there isn't any reaction but a blank, neutral expression and an even gaze. Betty can feel the small points of colour that she knows are starting in her cheeks, in response to the scrutiny and what she just said out loud and _how fucking dangerous_ that was. 

She hasn't told anyone that. She's outright lied when asked. She's insisted that she has no idea what happened, that her data is all gone, that she had only vague understanding when it came to Bruce's side of the project, that clearly the mistakes she'd obviously made - given the result - meant that she'd misunderstood something about the background research that had been done, that there was no way in this or any other world she could possibly, possibly do it again. 

It's a complete and total lie. But she's told it, over and over again, and this is the first time she's told anyone the truth. It's probably a bad idea. Except that it'll probably get pretty obvious if she does do any work for SHIELD on high-level projects, and it's probably better at this point to - 

Oh fuck it, she doesn't know. To make sure they know who they're dealing with. And that she's not an idiot, she's not oblivious to how these things work. If they're out to actually get her - whatever that means - then even if she knows it she doesn't have the resources or the backup she'd need to do anything about it that means keeping her secrets would help. And knowing that they can't _easily_ snow her in about that kind of reality might make them skip trying. 

Except that the response isn't the hint of interest Betty expected. It isn't _anything_ , Romanoff remains totally expressionless, and Betty kind of suspects that's unusual. 

The agent asks, "You could duplicate the process?" and Betty just doesn't . . .

Maybe she's being stupid. Naive. Maybe the expressionlessness is to tamp down hard on the agent's desire to do a little dance of joy at having found her superiors' wildest dreams. But Betty doesn't think so. It doesn't feel like that. 

It feels like she just opened the door on a nightmare. 

"Yes," Betty says, quietly. And it's true. It would take a lot of work and need a partner as good with his end of the deal as Bruce was for the actual design work, but she's not going to pretend that kind of person couldn't exist. And she understands more than enough to point them in the right direction, so they wouldn't have to make it up from scratch. 

Betty holds eye-contact with the SHIELD agent when she says, "But I won't." And can only hope the agent realizes what that means, and how far she'll go with it. 

" _Good_." The vehemence is honestly surprising. Betty blinks rapidly for a second as Agent Romanoff exhales in what appears to be genuine relief. " _Do not_ repeat what you've just said to me to anyone else," the agent adds, flat as Betty had been earlier. "Anyone who needs to know for your safety can be notified through our channels, and otherwise every single other person who knows is an exponential increase in risk to a great deal more than you, Dr Ross. Do you understand that?" 

Still caught off-guard, Betty nods. Romanoff continues to watch her face. 

"I have spent a considerable amount of time on background work for this particular operation, Dr Ross," she says, quietly. "I genuinely have no doubts about your personal conviction or how absolutely you mean what you said, but let me make this clear to you: there are people who would incinerate half the planet for what you just said you could do, and they are people who could make you, or anyone else, do whatever the fuck they want, when they want it done, and I doubt they'd give you enough time to kill yourself before they started."

Betty feels her eyes widen. She nods, slightly. 

Agent Romanoff appears to relax. Slightly. There's a little less intensity in her voice when she says, "You have a point: the risks are probably balanced by the benefits. But you should be aware they exist." 

"Agent Romanoff," Betty says, a little more weakly than she would have before the moment being pinned to her seat by the woman's attention, "I walked out onto a field in the line of fire for a 50-calibre machine gun and an armed missile. I would do it again. If the risks aren't actually bigger than that, we can skip this part of the conversation and I'll pick up the details later." 

Now Agent Romanoff's face shows an actual hint of amusement - a spark, even. And it isn't wry. Somehow Betty suspects she saw footage of that one. 

"Fair enough," she acknowledges. 

"So," Betty says, standing up. "We leave now?" 

This time the amusement's open. "You can pack, and send your resignation letter to the university," she says. "We took a _little_ time to plan." 

 

The walk to the waiting car gives Betty some time to reflect on just how bad an idea this is. 

It's not the stupidest thing she's ever done, because that list will be forever and always and for her entire life be topped, immovably, by letting Bruce convince her to skip _proper_ animal trials on the goddamned serum and process. And the list goes on to include things like "elbow an armed corporal in the face in a live-fire situation" and the bit about walking out into a field that she mentioned to Agent Romanoff. 

This might match up with those, for stupid. She has no reason to trust SHIELD. Actually, scratch that: she _doesn't_ trust SHIELD. She doesn't trust her read on Romanoff, she doesn't trust the organization, she honestly just about trusts nobody, at this point. _The General hated them and having to deal with them and just about everything about them_ is not actually an endorsement, and _aliens attacked the Earth, everyone's in danger_ is - as an argument - just about on par with "since some car accidents will kill you no matter what you do, I'm not going to bother wearing a seat-belt." Which is to say, it's completely goddamn idiotic. 

Knowing that isn't making any difference whatsoever to her choice, or her resolve. But she does know it. Betty's not sure that makes it better. 

As they walk out of the office, Agent Romanoff's posture and body-language revert to Talia Richter, and Betty has to bite her tongue to keep from admiring the transition out loud because it really, truly is astonishing. One train of thought now has the inappropriate but still intense desire to set something up so that she could see if this woman could even fool Leonard, out of complete and utter morbid curiosity. 

It means nobody would think anything of seeing them leave together. Talia's been shy up till now, but it's been a couple months, and Betty's known for trying to make people feel comfortable, so it's the most reasonable thing in the world for anyone who looks - and nobody probably will anyway - to assume that they're going out for coffee. 

Betty assumes that the agent has her own exit strategy for the persona, and that it reflects how much SHIELD cares about people putting two and two together after the fact. 

The car they walk up to even looks normal: a late 90s Chevrolet in silver, just about invisible around here. Romanoff gestures for Betty to take the front seat and heads towards the back just about the time Betty notices there's someone else sitting in the driver's seat.

As she gets in, Betty says, "Hi," to the man behind the wheel. She's pegged Agent Romanoff as being at least almost thirty years old; the man in the driver's seat splits the difference between that, and Betty's own age. He's wearing a beat-up leather jacket over a grey hooded sweatshirt, with sunglasses even though it's not that bright out. He raises his fingers off the wheel and gives a brief nod of acknowledgement before looking at Romanoff, any expression totally opaque to Betty because of the sunglasses. 

"Dr Ross' apartment," Romanoff says, doing up her seatbelt. Betty notices the SHIELD agent slides the shoulder-strap behind her, wonders why - and then it occurs to her that it would be easier to dive out of just a lap-band, if you needed to move quickly, without just totally giving up the protection of the seatbelt. 

She checks: the driver's the same. Splitting the difference. 

"Dr Ross," Romanoff goes on, "this is Agent Barton. Dr Ross will be joining us on the plane to New York." 

This gets a small smile from Agent Barton. "Welcome to the nuthouse," he says. The casual comment strikes Betty in contrast to Agent Romanoff's more formal language, but Betty has no idea how to read that. 

To Romanoff, Barton adds, "Does Stark know we're coming?"

"I plan on informing Ms Potts before we land," she replies, and Agent Barton looks amused. But Romanoff just goes on without a pause, turning her attention to Betty again.

"This is your resignation letter," handing Betty a clip-board with a few sheets of paper on it, "and you can use this tablet," and she hands Betty that, too, "to email Dr Samson."

"What," Betty says, bemused, "you didn't just have an email ready to go?"

"SHIELD respects Dr Samson's skills," Agent Romanoff replies blandly. "While resignation letters follow a certain format that allows for easy mimicry, personal emails present a much higher risk of generating suspicion if the forgery isn't perfect. And with Dr Samson it would need to be extremely perfect." 

One of the twelve giddy trains of thought makes Betty feel the need to point out that _perfect_ is an absolute, and you can't have more or less or indeed any comparative of perfect. She shoves that train of thought back into the dark of the unconscious, because it belongs to an insecure twelve-year-old. not here. 

"So we figured pass on the potential total waste of effort," Agent Barton finishes, pulling out of the parking lot.

That's mildly reassuring, Betty decides. It's a small indication that they would have let her stay here, if she'd said no.

Signing the letter is easy, although Betty does read it through to make sure there aren't any surprises. Emailing Leonard is something else: he really is good at telling when people are lying, even by text, so in the end she gives up and says, _Something's come up and I'm out of town indefinitely. I promise that I'm fine; I'll catch up with you as soon as I can._

It's honest; she just hopes the part about being "fine" doesn't turn out to be mistaken. 

Then, in one of those moments that seems to always happen when you're in the middle of unexpected about-faces in your life, Betty's brain kicks in and she blurts, "Ringo. My cat."

"He's a registered passenger," Agent Romanoff replies immediately. She smiles her thin smile again. "We're very good at this, Dr Ross."

"Creepily good," Agent Barton adds cheerfully.

Betty works hard to swallow the giggles. She's pretty sure they'll get hysterical if she doesn't.


	3. Chapter 3

It turns out "packing", for Dr Ross, means "grab a suitcase and throw stuff in it until it's full." She grabs for things right when she thinks of them, not bothering to pretend she's going in any kind of order. Clint watches the whole thing in a sort of idle way, because watching people pack is a good way to get to know some things about them. There's lots of other good ways, mind, but this one's right in front of him. 

Clothes go in by the armful, with only a few items - mostly dresses - getting any kind of special attention. She throws in one pair of runners and two pairs of heels, and then looks down at the black flats she's wearing and nodding like she's confirming something. 

She stares at her bathroom for a minute before grabbing her toothbrush, some bottles that look like boutique perfume and a small tub of face-cream, before declaring that she can buy the rest again later. From a cheap-looking vanity - the kind you can pick up for a hundred bucks from Bed Bath and Beyond in a flat-pack - she grabs an antique-looking vanity set consisting of brush, hand-mirror, comb and heel-sized emory board. 

Heirlooms, Clint figures. The suede jewelry-roll that gets thrown on top of those is also probably the pieces that have any particular worth, sentimental or otherwise, because she ignores the more casual, inexpensive-looking ones hanging off earring-trees and other jewelry storing devices on the bureau. 

Dr Ross packs like someone used to leaving things behind, who's managed to winnow her possessions down to a mental list of the things she really cares about, but who hasn't had to actually cut and run often enough to have it down to a science. Her cat twines around her legs, a fluffy black tom who looks like someone threw a bunch of bleach at him, leaving him spattered with points of white. He tells her, at length, how much he doesn't like any of this. 

Clint goes in search of a coffee-machine on the basis that considering the mess she's making here, she won't care if he makes a mess of the kitchen in the name of caffeinating himself. 

When he comes back with a mug full of black-and-bitter for himself, and a second mug full of milky-sugary-slop for Tasha (whose taste in coffee - or tea, for that matter - he will never understand) Tasha's watching with an almost respectful kind of interest while Dr Ross goes through . . . 

Well, a lot of stuff. She goes through music-boxes, old hard-cover books, a couple statues, the backs of paintings and a couple of random art-objects. She pulls very small flash-drives out of all of them, tucking them into a small cloth bag. 

When she glances up, Dr Ross shrugs. "Sterns' lab was safely destroyed, he'd only barely reverse engineered about half of what we did, and I wiped all our data off everything I could get my hands on," she says. "I kept it. I made copies, and the safest place to hide them was with me. It's amazing how much people underestimate you when you're the sweet lady scientist," she adds.

Clint chooses to take that as a friendly, gracious kind of warning. 

The flash-drives don't go in the suitcase. Dr Ross tucks the cloth bag into the pocket of her jeans. Her hand goes to her throat and the heart-pendant she's wearing, like she's reassuring herself it's there; she does the same thing with her gold watch and a thin silver ring with a jade stone she wears on her right hand.

Apparently reassured, she grabs an elastic and ties her hair back in a pony-tail that makes her look about five years younger and starts to try to force the suitcase closed.

It'll technically make it, so Clint lends a hand on the basis that he's not a jerk. Dr Ross flashes him a grateful smile and hauls it off the bed to rest its wheels on the floor. She looks around again, shrugs and picks up her cat. 

"Everything else that matters is in storage," she says. "This place is a lot smaller than my old house, and I never really meant to be here long." Her tone goes wistful for a moment, and then she tucks her protesting cat up against her chest and hauls the suitcase to the front door, where they find the cat-carrier in the closet.

 

Through the magical powers of SHIELD pre-arrangement, they skip security at the airport, even though they're on a commercial flight: there's someone with all the signs of being a SHIELD entry-level waiting with the security guy by one of the Employees Only doors between the magical lands of before-security and after-security, and after he and Tasha have both pressed their palms to the tablet in her hand the nice security guy opens the door. 

Clint hates airport security, hates security theatre and, somewhat to Fury's annoyance, has been a signatory to every petition and action yelling at the government to rein in the TSA and use their brains since 9/11 happened in the first place. Not that it's done any good, but he still signs them. In fact, he signs them with every ongoing alias and persona he has. Otherwise, if he has to deal with the giant clusterfuck, he entertains himself by fucking it up further. 

Somewhere around 2005, Fury and Coulson both got tired of hearing Clint list all the deadly weapons and other contraband he'd managed to get past the security screening compared to the number of totally fucking pointless searches the idiots make of perfectly harmless people, and the utterly stupid waste-of-time searches they had managed to do. As of 2005, someone had made sure that every time Clint flew, he skipped that line.

He notes that the moment Dr Ross grasps that they're not going through the line, she switches the flash-drive bag from her jeans to tucked in the left side of her bra. He kind of likes this woman: it'd grab attention if she'd pulled something out of her bra for the security screen, and the drives would set off the alarms. But it's a hell of a lot harder to lift something out of a woman's bra than it is to lift it out of her jeans pocket. 

They're flying first-class. Tasha'd actually suggested Economy Plus, it being less conspicuous, and the SHIELD physio'd caught wind of it somehow and threatened to take them both off active duty - they'd both done more damage to themselves through the Chitauri attack than they'd really realized, not that that's new, and some of it's taking some work to iron back out. 

_I swear to_ God _and on my mother's grave,_ Rajit - the Level Seven senior physio - had not-quite-shouted, _if either of you sleep on something that isn't the right shape for you to lie_ flat _I will quit. I will resign. I'm warning you._

So they'd switched to First Class. Clint can't exactly complain. 

It means Dr Ross slides her complaining cat - her only carry-on except her purse - into the available space with a lot of space to spare. Then she unzips the soft carrier and pets the thing until it shuts up and decides to have a nap.

As they settle in, Tasha hands Dr Ross the tablet she'd used to email earlier and says, "That should bring you up to speed on everything. Video footage will be available when we get to Stark Tower," and, Clint fills in cheerfully and silently to himself, when there's absolutely no chance of anyone looking over your shoulder and seeing what they shouldn't. It's hard to read over someone's shoulder, as far away from each other as First-Class seats are. But it's easier to see three seconds of video.

Even if their seats are right up against the bulkhead separating the seating areas. 

Planes are not Clint's favourite places in the world, but as the flight attendants start going through their song and dance, he does his best to settle down into some kind of comfortable position and rest, on the basis that the plane is really unlikely to come under attack. And if it does, he's fucked anyway. 

Tasha's been driven on this for weeks, and while Clint's not complaining about the opportunity to keep busy and not think, it's not really restful. Physically, anyway. Nothing's restful, mentally. 

"If I didn't know you both have the answer parameters memorized," Hill had said the last time they'd seen each other, just after convincing Fury to let them do this in the first place, "I'd force you both through psych evals."

"See," Clint had parried, "I knew that deep down, you cared."

Hill gave him a Look. He noticed that while she'd give him a Look, she'd just exchange long ones with Tasha, Tasha wearing her best Bland and Professional expression - and after she'd given up trying to quell Clint with a Look, that's what she did. 

Then Hill had sighed and just said, "I'd really rather not to have to clean up after either of you and a bad day. Please keep that in mind."

Clint's already made the tentative decision that once Dr Ross is dropped off, they're going to hang around Stark Tower for a while: Stark may be one of the most irritating men on the planet when he tries, but the one thing he does seem to understand is hair-trigger reflexes and excessive paranoia. Plus the security systems at the Tower are reliably run by an AI that can hack SHIELD, and finally Stark's likely to have better food than any of the available SHIELD hide-aways.

When he'd noted this to Tasha, she'd added, dryly, "Plus it's really, really tall," which if nothing else isn't an outright nix on the idea. He lets her think about it and come to her own conclusion about how much extra time that'll give her to observe whether she's right about Ross's effect on Banner. She can even blame it on Clint.

About a half-hour after take-off, he glances over to see Dr Ross smiling slightly as she reads. Given that alien-caused carnage isn't usually a huge upper, Clint asks, "What?" keeping his voice low enough that it's between them and no one else. 

She glances up, startled, and then smiles again. "I told him he could direct it."

That piques Clint's curiousity. "He didn't think he could?" Dr Ross shrugs.

"He wasn't exactly in a great headspace at the time. The General was hunting us across the country, we had no money, we didn't even know if what we were chasing could possibly work, he didn't want me involved at all, and I think each . . . " she waves the hand that isn't holding the tablet, "transformation was leaving him with flashbacks, traumatic memories that were hard to process. He didn't want to talk about it. But I was pretty sure he could."

You have to know Tasha to know she's listening, intent as hell, and while Ross doesn't, Clint does. He leaves it alone, though, as Ross goes back to her reading.

He also reflects that after a long separation, starting with _I told you so_ might not be the smartest thing in the world, but then he figures: they were together for years, he _had_ run away on her For Her Own Good, and overall, he'll just mind his own business.

******

The first-class cabin is suspiciously empty. Both of Coulson's PAs refused bereavement leave, both of them know Coulson's usual habit of adjusting things around Natalia and Clint when the job's been rougher than usual, and the transition to Sitwell and his minions hasn't even hit midway yet, with Coulson's PAs filling in the duties they already knew about. So it's entirely possible that they bought out all the relevant tickets when they booked these three.

For that matter, Natalia's absolutely sure that she and Clint, at least, will have missions run through Maria at least, if not Fury directly. Clint and Sitwell's feud might be quiet, but it's long-standing and it's _bitter_ , and Fury's one of the few people who know just how willing Barton would be to put a bullet in Sitwell's head given the slightest excuse. 

And it wouldn't take much to transfer the work of tacitly shepherding her and Barton around from Coulson's PAs to Maria's, or Nick's. The four of them already worked in an incestuous little tangle anyway, known to at least half of SHIELD as _Strike Team Paperclip_ , so - 

Natalia privately hates the nickname, and never used it. She has no good reason to hate it, but she does. At the same time, there's a twinge of regret that it's going to die out; Sitwell's PAs don't have a chance in hell of working their way into the same mutual tangle. 

The point being (and Natalia recognizes the endless circles of thought for the displacement that they are, and knows what they're displacing, but leaves it to lie anyway) there's only two other people in their cabin, and they're on the far side, and asleep. 

So is Barton, which is . . .good. 

Natalia doesn't understand "worry". She can simulate it, she knows how it works, but the actual experience is one of the ones she doesn't think she'll ever know from the inside. She can see it in other people, see when their concerns cross over into _worry_ , but she's never felt it. And it's different from what she feels as concern. 

And she's not concerned about Barton. Not yet. But she's got volumes of reasons she might need to be concerned, sooner or later, so she is monitoring his sleeping, eating and startle-response patterns, mentally noting how each is doing and what that might mean. And right now, sleep is the metaphorical column with the most metaphorical notes.

Her own sleep is within acceptable parameters, her dreams predictable if not exactly restful. Pigs will not only fly but perform aerial ballet followed by a recitation of Sapphic damn poetry before _she_ can sleep in public, though. Barton can right now because she isn't, and because he's sleeping lightly. Natalia doesn't have that kind of fine-tuning, and if someone other than Barton is there to see her, it just isn't going to happen.

So instead Natalia catches up on work, including a report on her interrupted interrogation and her educated conjecture as to where things went after she left behind the mess for Strike Team Epsilon to clean up. She also drops the emailed apology to May, because that had been a _lot_ of mess. Natalia hadn't even tried to keep the cleanup team in mind, hadn't bothered to consider that kind of thing. Not at the time. She probably could have, but she hadn't. She'd just wanted them all dead, as fast as humanly possible, so she could deal with what Coulson'd just dropped on her head. 

Natalia's pretty sure the memory of his voice saying _Barton's been compromised_ is going to keep showing up in her nightmares for more or less the rest of her life. 

But that meant that Melinda'd been left with what Natalia left behind, which would not have been easy to deal with or make disappear. Natalia owes her the apology, and she spends a few minutes on it. 

In the list of reasons her dreams are full of visions of thwarted and frustrated attempts to carve Loki into small and agonized screaming pieces, fucking up her operation there ranks near the bottom - but it still makes the list.

When the flight attendant comes around, Natalia orders a gin and tonic, two ounce. She doesn't need anyone to tell her she's on hair-trigger. And when Maria Hill had, Natalia'd mostly wanted to retort _medice, cura te ipsum._ Maria's a wreck, though almost nobody would believe it. Fury, Natalia, Barton, May, and a dead man who's the whole reason - Maria can fool everyone else. But there's not much you can do about that, it won't affect Maria's work - nothing does - and the worst possible thing for Maria would be to have nothing to do. 

And Maria being a wreck doesn't significantly raise her risk of accidentally killing someone for brushing too close to her, a distinction Natalia can't actually apply to herself. So she'll self-medicate with a relatively small amount of alcohol, for the moment. 

Barton's still asleep. 

Dr Ross's soft sigh draws Natalia out of her thoughts; the woman's put the tablet down, emerging from her pose of deep concentration and rolling her shoulders out. She takes off her glasses and rubs at her eyes, forgetting - apparently - that she has makeup on. 

She uses a reasonably good brand of water-poof mascara, because it survives the abuse reasonably well. The eyeliner disappears rather than smearing, and the eye-shadow's neutral. To Natalia, it tells the story of a woman who knows she's going to forget she's wearing makeup and rub at her eyes, and who's given up trying to stop, tailoring her application instead. 

Her remark about herself earlier is accurate, Natalia notes: Dr Ross does project an air of doe-eyed harmlessness, almost shyness, one that it takes a certain way of looking at the world to see is a lie. Even the relative lack of concern about her makeup is part of it. Most people would see the portrait of vulnerability. 

Natalia isn't most people, and she can see the lines of deliberate choice. If Ross wanted to, Natalia's very, very confident that the woman could utilize every little weapon and defense in the arsenal of appearance, posture, everything. She doesn't want to. She's opted out. 

Dr Ross waves the attendant over and asks for a glass of white wine before handing Natalia back the tablet and rubbing her eyes with the fingertips of both hands. 

"I watched the news," she says, keeping her voice to low conversational pitch. "And the follow-up afterwards. I knew _that_ , at least," she sighs, "would be full of whatever the people in charge decided it was okay to release, and the real-time footage was distant to say the least . . . it's still scary to know how close we came to being wiped out, as a species."

Natalia can only acknowledge that with a crooked smile, and says, "We're endeavouring to widen the gap."

"I hope so," Dr Ross replies, gesturing to the tablet. "The second scariest part of that is reading how many other - " she seems to be groping for the word, so Natalia supplies two.

"Potential aggressors?" she suggests, and Dr Ross sighs again.

"That works," she says. "How many there are. That must give you all nightmares."

Natalia shrugs. "It is what it is." It's not the kind of thing that gives Natalia nightmares, to be honest: the decisions involved aren't decisions she'll have to make. Hill has those nightmares.

For Nick to have nightmares, he'd have to _sleep_ sometime. 

The attendant comes back with Dr Ross's wine; the attendant leaves again, Dr Ross gives a quick glance at the cabin and then lowers her voice further before saying, "They actually wanted you to use Blonksy?"

Natalia just rolls her eyes. She still has no words for that idiocy, but life at SHIELD always involved manoeuvring around the Council that presumed to rule it. She's been avoiding thinking about how much harder that will be in future without Coulson, and she avoids it now, too. 

But she notes, "Stark will probably say something snide about your father," because it's only fair that the doctor go in warned. 

Dr Ross's answering smile has a certain resigned quality. "I've seen him on TV," she says. "I went to school with enough guys like him, he won't come as a shock."

Natalia quirks an eyebrow. "Really?" she asks. Admittedly, the deep innards of science-based academia hasn't been a place she's spent too much time - by the time they're making the decisions that matter, they've taken on all the same fixations and foibles as any other politician. It's amazing how consistent people are, sometimes. 

"'Flamboyant, egocentric asshole' should show up in more stereotypes of scientists than it does," she says. "Most of them just have to learn some social skills in order to get their grants. I don't think Tony Stark ever had that problem."

Natalia snorts a soft laugh. 

Ross's cat decides to take this moment to start scratching at his carrier and Ross gets him to stop and feeds him more treats with a mild sedative wrapped up in them. 

Then, after taking a moment to drink some of her wine, Dr Ross clears her throat and says, in a slightly sadder voice, "He doesn't know I'm coming, does he." 

It isn't a question, and Natalia doesn't need her to name the _he_. Ross doesn't wait for an answer, either, just looks at the wine-glass in her hand and says, "Probably for the best. He can be a complete idiot about noble self-sacrifice, you know?"

There's a brittle edge to the laughter. Natalia thinks of a small girl paid money to bring a doctor to an imaginary sick-bed, and of a man arriving at a city-turned-battlefield on a borrowed bike, and says, "I know."

She half-expects Dr Ross to ask the question that's been in the air, unspoken, since the lab ( _why do you_ really _want me in New York, Agent Romanoff?_ ). She's not sure if her answer would be the truth or a lie. 

But instead, Dr Ross stares out the window for a while, slowly finishing her wine.


	4. Chapter 4

Grief doesn't respect logic. Pepper knows this. It still bothers her, though, that when Natasha Romanoff's text materializes on her phone, she feels a momentary ache that the name she's reading isn't _Phil Coulson._

It's an asinine kind of ache. Firstly, there's absolutely no reason to assume Natasha's texting her for SHIELD-related purposes; secondly, even if it were, Natasha sometimes texted her about SHIELD-adjacent things even when Phil was alive and texting her off and on too. It's stupid, and unreasonable, and it hurts anyway. 

Pepper hates grief, more than any other emotion she'd on the whole rather not have. Grief is inherently helpless; grief only _comes_ from something you can't do anything about. Grief only comes around when the loss is beyond your control - when you think there's anything you can do, it's loss, desperation, anger, sorrow, terror, insanity, all kinds of things. Grief isn't just about loss; grief means you've _lost_. It's over and done. 

It's not something Pepper does well with. Never has, and never will. Grief might actually be the one emotion Tony deals with better than her - and he doesn't deal with it very well. 

So Pepper ends up angry, because of the text on her phone, but the anger isn't at Natasha or about Natasha. It just . . .is. So Pepper puts her phone down on the desk for a moment and takes a slow, deep breath, trying to put it away so she can deal with the here, and the now. And the fact that apparently something's up, involving Natasha Romanoff, and instead of being thrown completely off-track by her own unruly emotions, Pepper _should_ be hoping it's nothing too unfortunate. 

After the couple of moments it takes her to manage it - her hands flat on the desk, her shoes kicked off so she can put her feet flat on the floor, all the little things that let her pretend to feel grounded - she picks up the phone again and unlocks it. 

The text is short, straight-forward, and Natasha all over - meaning it's a strange mix of the totally functional and oddly idiosyncratic: _arriving to crash your tower in ~45 minutes. :)_ The smileys have always gotten Pepper: somehow, it feels wrong that a woman so deadly she can walk through the best security contractors money can buy without messing up her makeup . . .also makes liberal use of emoticons in her texts. 

But Natasha does it. 

Pepper hasn't heard from Natasha since what's now being called the Battle of New York - at least by the papers - but it's not like SHIELD wouldn't know she and Tony are still in residence at the Tower. And going to be, for plenty of time to come. 

There's two reasons for that. One is, of course, that she's not leaving her baby until it looks less like it was just the centre of what amounts to an interstellar damn war. She's put a lot of goddamn work into this stupid building and she wants it _finished._

But the other is that she's pretty firm - and for once Tony agrees, and even brought it up himself before she could - that Stark Industries not only needs to lead the reconstruction, but needs to be _seen_ doing it. The damage is extensive and _expensive_ , and the attempts to pass the buck and the blame and the responsibility are already starting, and Pepper's disgusted enough to actually spit. 

It matters, for what she wants Stark Industries to be - for what _they_ want it to be - that Stark Industries is right here, sorting out the chaos around its base. And promising grants and donation-matching and a load of other stuff to get everything rebuilt. 

At least half of that money comes along with a firm stipulation for some goddamn low-cost housing - something Tony'd also actually beaten Pepper to insisting on. A circuitous conversation and a bunch of Tony attempting to pull some absolute bullshit about being offended she was even asking later, Pepper'd managed to establish that Tony's once again attempting to apologize to someone via using money to do something he thinks they'd want. 

She's fairly sure he's right: everything she knows about Captain Rogers does in fact imply that he'd want housing for people with low-income to be a priority for anyone building anything. On the basis that it's been a stressful fucking time, she doesn't give him much of a hard time about how he could try just not _being an asshole_ , which would save him needing to apologize this way, and she doesn't try that hard to pin him down on exactly what he _did_ that he needs to apologize for. 

He's also decided to turn the top five floors under the penthouse into personal floors for Banner, Romanoff, Barton, Rogers and Thor, but Pepper hasn't decided whether that's more apology or an attempt to make friends. It's hard to tell with Tony. 

Speaking of - 

"JARVIS," she says, aloud. "Let Tony know we've got guests for dinner, please?" 

"Yes, Ms Potts," JARVIS replies, promptly. "Shall I tell him whom to expect?"

"Yes, JARVIS, thank you," Pepper agrees. 

He's doing that more often, Pepper thinks - or at least more often around her. She's never really sure what goes between Tony and his AI when no one else is around. But when he's interacting with her, JARVIS is more and more inclined to offer things before she asks, or suggest things that turn out to be good ideas. 

Pepper'd almost been worried, when Bruce had come to stay. JARVIS had been the only other one in Tony's labs for so long, besides her. And she wasn't working with Tony, she was working _around_ Tony, so it was different. She's never been sure just how . . .how much of a _person_ JARVIS is. And she wasn't sure what would happen if he decided to get jealous of Tony's attention. 

So far, there hasn't been a problem. And so far Bruce Banner's seemed perfectly happy to have conversations with the empty air, unperturbed by Tony including JARVIS in conversations or in banter, and JARVIS seems perfectly happy to include Bruce and interact with him whenever he's around. Which is most of the time. 

It's funny watching Tony be someone else's social mentor, but, Pepper thinks, it takes someone who's as much of a human tornado as Tony to get him to move. She's glad he hasn't left yet. His loneliness is so obvious - at least to her - that it makes _her_ ache, sometimes. 

JARVIS is passing along the head's up, but Pepper knows where both men have been all day, and it's a Sunday, which means Tony's PA is on-call rather than nannying him all the time, so since she's done what she meant to do in the office, she goes to follow up and make sure Tony actually _listened_ , not just heard. 

The R&D floors are almost fully repaired, to absolutely no one's remote surprise. To be fair, they had taken less damage than the higher floors: at no point had there actually been pseudo-gods and monsters actually beating each other to a pulp on those floors. 

JARVIS must have alerted Tony to the moment she got far enough down the corridor to make it work, because the door to the lab he's in slid open to show him leaning through, sitting in a chair with wheels, so he can call, "What, someone's trying to invade again already?"

Pepper doesn't stop her brisk walk, but the idea does actually make her shudder. 

"That's not even funny, Tony," she says, and flicks his ear as she moves around him to get in the door, and adds, "Hi Bruce," and then goes on, to Tony, "No, I don't know why they're coming, Natasha didn't say."

"If SHIELD wants something, the answer is no," Tony says, in a voice that someone who wasn't Pepper Potts might think is joking. "Unless they want to give me a medal, in which case they have to put in a formal request for my time with what's-her-face, the girl who isn't you."

Pepper shoots him a Look, which he matches with purely manufactured innocence. She rolls her eyes. 

Before the interviews even started, Pepper had made it _very_ clear that while Tony could obviously turn down any candidate he found annoying, he was _not_ going to put them through a wringer on the way there and if she caught him actually calling a single damn one "woman who isn't Pepper" he could look forward to spending the rest of his _life_ celibate and metaphorically - and literally - sleeping on the couch. 

After he'd chosen Janine, Pepper'd also flatly forbidden him from referring to _or introducing her as_ "my Vulcan", "Spock", "T'Janine" or anything similar, and no she didn't care if the young woman keeps her hair short or if her automatic response to Tony throwing something ridiculous in her lap is an otherwise-expressionless lifting of her eyebrow. 

And in public, Tony's obeyed her not only to the letter but actually to the spirit - but trying to get him to drop either joke in private is like trying to keep a dog from rolling in muck. 

"If it had anything formal to do with SHIELD, we'd be hearing from Agent Hill,"  
Bruce notes while - probably wisely - mostly ignoring them and keeping most of his attention on the screen in front of him. Bruce is astonishingly good at ducking Tony's attempts to involve him in arguments that really aren't his problem, which is one of Tony's favourite tactics when he's losing. 

Pepper has no idea what they're doing down here: she'll hear about it when they're done, probably, because Tony prefers to present her with _faits accomplis_ , rather than projects in progress. And since Bruce appears to have slightly more common sense than Tony Stark could ever _find_ let alone possess, Pepper's not too worried about the potential catastrophe.

As compared to how worried she's been since, oh, her first interview for the PA job at Stark Industries in the first place. 

"Since it's almost six o'clock," she goes on like her silent sideline with Tony didn't happen, "I'm adding her to dinner and having a room made up on the guest floor, because there still isn't a structurally sound hotel nearby."

"You might want to make dinner and room for two," Bruce says absently, still moving things around on his screen. He looks up and adds, "Unless Natasha's stopped acting like she thinks if Agent Barton gets out of her sight he'll disappear."

Pepper has a hard time deciding whether or not Bruce likes Natasha. Something about the whole mess around the Chitauri attack's left both of them with a weird, silent kind of tension and that's obvious to anyone with eyes and a brain. It's just not obvious what kind of tension it is, or whether it's all there is, or if it's interfering with what might otherwise be a friendship. It's just there. 

On the other hand, he's right. Pepper'd spent months casually meeting Natasha for coffee or some other brief thing and never so much as heard Clint Barton's name, but since the attack they might as well be handcuffed together. 

They've both been here, to look at plans and give Tony slightly bemused looks about his emphatic insistence that he's going to give them whole floors of the building complete with suites and basically anything they want. Supposedly, they came separately - one day for Natasha, the other for Barton - but each day had been both of them. And the one time Pepper and Natasha have managed to meet for coffee, Pepper had noticed the thread of Natasha's attention that stretched somewhere else, and eventually pinned it to Barton, window-shopping nearby. 

She'd noticed it mostly because it was familiar - just from the other side. 

So Pepper nods at Bruce and says, "Thank you," and adds the note to the dinner order in her phone. 

She leans down to give Tony a kiss on the cheek and says, "Don't lose track of time," before she heads down to the gym. 

Tony does lose track of time, but JARVIS doesn't, so Tony and Bruce do manage to make it up to the penthouse before their visitor (or visitors) manage to park downstairs. 

Natasha even lets the valet park her car - another Tony-style apology that Pepper had been fairly dubious about, but which had apparently been dead on. 

Some days, Pepper misses working with Natasha. Granted that it was a hellish string of days that she did it, and granted Hugh Harker, her new PA, is very good at what he does, but there's something about Natasha's breathtaking efficiency and attention to detail that Pepper misses, even if they do come wrapped up in a package that culminates in one of the deadliest assassins known to humankind. 

Pepper still feels slightly embarrassed about her initial behaviour to the agent, but in her defense, Natasha had been doing everything she could to get past Tony's guard, and that inevitably turns people - women, yes, but also men, it just happens less often and less overtly, given how many of them assume that Tony's closeted instead of ragingly indifferent to what anyone thinks of who he has slept with or is sleeping with, in what combinations - into the kind of people Pepper wants to kick through six glass doors and then use to vent her annoyance at promoting his bad habits by grinding her shoe-heel into their hands.

That, and she'd been under a lot of other stress. 

Natasha had accepted the apology, with her own apology for the covert infiltration of Stark Industries in general. After some discussion, they'd both agreed it was all Tony's fault anyway.

Pepper had then made absolutely goddamn sure that nobody, not even Natasha, could use her company that way again. 

"Agent Barton is accompanying Agent Romanova, as Dr Banner surmised," JARVIS tells them all, as Tony pours four drinks. "There is however also another woman with them."

Tony shrugs and reaches for another glass; Bruce looks slightly uncomfortable, the way he always does at the spectre of meeting someone new, and Pepper feels her eyebrows go up. She can't think of anyone that Natasha would be bringing to Stark Tower. 

She really can't think of anyone Natasha would be bringing that JARVIS would stay circumspect about, letting Natasha introduce them instead of forewarning them all. She glances at Bruce and she's pretty sure he hasn't caught that; she glances at Tony and the look he turns back says plainly that he absolutely has. 

Pepper's still not used to Natasha's short hair, and the first thing that goes through her head when their guests step out of the elevator is a brief and shallow mourning for the continued lack of long red curls. The second thought is that Clint Barton looks a little bit less like a nervous cat than the last time she saw him.

The third is that she's seen the unknown woman before, on something: she has long black hair back in a pony-tail that has the fuzz of several hours wear, a long loose cardigan on over jeans and a v-necked T, and rectangular glasses that she's pushing back into place. She also looks nervous.

That's about all Pepper has time to see because Bruce is on his feet, the sudden movement making him the centre of everyone's attention. And then he says, "Betty," and then looks like he's forgotten how words work.

"Hi, Bruce," the woman says, both hands wrapped around the strap of the purse on her shoulder. Maybe, Pepper thinks, to keep from being more obviously defensive by folding her arms. "You look a little bit less tired than the last time I saw you."

Natasha and Barton have stepped back out of the way, Natasha wearing her Calm and Professional Agent face, Barton just looking bland. Beyond that, Pepper finds herself more than a little bit at a loss to think beyond the moment, except for hoping that this is a good surprise, because she _just_ got the penthouse knocked into decent enough shape that she wants to live in it instead of the guest floor and it'd be more than a little tragic to have to do it all again. 

Then she feels guilty for thinking that.

There's one of those stretching, awkward moments that happen when two people are trying really hard not to trap the other one in any kind of physical greeting, and then Bruce and the woman both take slightly unsteady steps forward and have their arms around each other, hugging tight enough that the woman's glasses push askew on Bruce's shoulder.

Pepper looks back at Tony: as much as she does like Bruce, the moment has more or less reduced her to _he's your friend, what now?_ Tony just shrugs. 

Then he finishes pouring the extra drink, picks up two of them and wanders out from around the bar to hold the two glasses out to the two people still trying to crack each other's ribs.

"I'm going to go out on a limb," he says, casually, "and guess that this is _the_ Betty."

For just a second, Pepper thinks she sees a flash of annoyance on Natasha's face - probably at Tony pulling her introduction out from under her. But if it's there, it's gone again instantly and besides, Pepper might be projecting her own annoyance at his completely unenlightening comment, and the fact that it's unenlightening.

"Dr Elizabeth Ross," Natasha confirms and corrects, taking one of the glasses from Tony, since neither Bruce nor the woman in question seem inclined to take anything for the moment. Barton takes the other, the bland taking on a tinge of amusement. 

" _Oh_ ," Pepper says aloud as the name clicks and she remembers the background she read on the plane, waiting to see if the world was going to end.

Again.

She looks at Natasha, and then looks at the two people clinging to each other, and mostly still hopes that this is a good surprise, and that Natasha knows what she's doing.

******

She'd meant to be more dignified, and she'd meant not to push it, for any available definition of it. She'd meant to just . . .take things with care and attention and maybe slow and with all kinds of attention for feeling - hers and Bruce's - but somehow that goes out the window the moment she sees Bruce's arm move like he might want to hold her.

Then Betty's body has a mind of its own and wants to be where she's always felt she actually belongs and doesn't care what her _stupid_ conscious intentions think about anything. 

Which is the stupidest, sappiest way of thinking about it in the world, she thinks as her skin registers all the pressures and discomforts of a too-tight hug, but that doesn't stop it from being true. That's the problem. That's always been the problem.

This _is_ where she belongs. And she's been somewhere else, _he's_ been somewhere else, for too _fucking_ long. And for a heartbeat that thought makes her so unbelievably angry that she tightens her arms enough that she knows it has to hurt.

Bruce's hand presses against the back of her neck and she's got to be making it hard for him to breathe, and there are four people staring at them, two of whom she doesn't know at all and two that are hardly any better, but all that gets overridden by the part of her that remembers months of wondering if someone had managed to kill or catch him yet and comes with its own hissing internal soundtrack of _do you have any idea how much I've worried you goddamn asshole . . . ._

The way Bruce's hand cradles her head and the other arm wraps all the way around her ribs, the way his face presses against her hair, you might think he could actually hear what she's thinking. 

Betty hears her name over the rush in her ears; by degrees she and Bruce let each other go, as by the same degrees awareness of their audience pushes itself to the front. She steps back but keeps a hold of Bruce's hand, and he doesn't pull it away.

"Uh," he says, running one hand through his hair, doing more to put it in disarray than the hug had, "yes. This is Dr Ross."

"Betty," Betty says, automatically, and then takes the glass of something alcoholic that's held out to her by - well, by Tony Stark, but she would rather have died than act like this matters at all and she's anything but graciously sanguine right now. 

And if that's Tony Stark then the slightly-more-strawberry-than-blonde woman she doesn't know has to be - oh, God, Betty thinks, I can't call a woman I haven't even met yet "Pepper", she has to have a real name - well, Ms Potts.

Betty strangles on the desire to snap at either Agent Romanoff or Agent Barton _or both_ that they could have tried to arrange it so she could see Bruce alone, but then she has to wonder if he would have tried to do again what he tried to do out the back of Stan's, to run away and disappear again, make her live with the choice she'd never actually make if he asked her. 

"The author of the primer against gamma poisoning," Tony Stark says cheerfully, "among other things - I'd really like to talk to you about that, did you - "

"Tony!" Potts says, giving him a repressive look, and then to Betty she adds, "I'm sorry, ignore him. Pepper Potts," and she holds out one hand, "it's wonderful to meet you." 

Completely non-plussed with the byplay, Betty shakes hands, a little mechanically, as Stark protests.

"What?" he demands, gesturing with his own glass. "I respect and am fascinated by her work as a scientist, and I - "

Bruce gives Tony a very _old_ look and says, "Quit while you're ahead." Stark hides a smirk behind his drink. Betty's not actually sure if he was hitting on her, or what, and if not what on earth that's all about, but she . . .also doesn't care right now. 

Agent Romanoff takes hold of the moment, cutting through at least most of the hesitation that's caught everyone by saying, in her bland Agent voice that Betty's already starting to recognize, "Dr Banner, SHIELD has asked Dr Ross to consider making her skills available us for the future; we think they'll be relevant on issues very likely to come up soon." 

"You didn't tell me," Bruce says in his calm-and-level voice, and Betty has to stamp down on the desire to snap, _If you don't want me here -_  
because that's a petty, emotional and simplistic response to a complicated knot of the things life throws at people. Including the fear she reminds herself is reasonable, at least a priori, even if she rejects it. 

Because it's Bruce and he can still read her body if not her mind, he glances at her and squeezes her hand like he's offering an apology.

"I suspected the knowledge might cause you to take precipitous action," Agent Romanoff says, calmly. "Of the kind you might on reflection regret." And Betty doesn't understand the look Bruce gives the woman at all this time, _or_ the not-quite-a-glare he gives her back. 

After a pause he just murmurs, "Duly noted, Agent Romanoff," and for some reason that makes Agent Barton shift his weight, just a little bit. There is clearly, Betty thinks, some serious tension she needs to catch up on reading. 

"In the interests of totally undermining this pointlessly tense, uncomfortable and awkward moment," Stark announces brightly, "you're all invited to dinner, although since Agent Romanoff wasn't polite enough to RSVP with the full numbers of her party we'll have to stall for a few minutes to let the kitchen scrape together a final plate. I have full confidence in them," he adds. "But we can do that more comfortably over cocktails and in my dining-room rather than my living-room. Which is that way." 

Stark gestures with his clasped hands over Betty's head towards a doorway she hadn't really noticed. And that shouldn't _work_ as a way of making everyone relax, given the total lack of manners or social grace, but it does. 

As everyone starts to move, Bruce squeezes her hand again and she pauses to look at him, and sees every familiar bit of sincerity when he says, "You look wonderful."

She manages a smile, which gets easier once she gets started. "I missed you," she replies and keeps hold of his hand until they actually sit down to dinner.


	5. Chapter 5

The food is amazing. Granted, Betty's not a good cook and even if she were she tends to forget about things like meals until she's really hungry and then grab something from one of the places on campus or otherwise near to where she's working at any given time, and those aren't really ever the top of the culinary pile. Still, she knows amazing food when she's eating it and tonight, she's eating it. 

The wine is also amazing, and that means Betty has to exert some pretty strong self-control to only have one glass. Wine has a bad habit of making her giddy. Pepper's kind enough to only offer her another one once, and seems to actually get that Betty's demurral really is reluctant, while for good reason. 

Tony Stark turns out to be a lot less obnoxious than Betty thought he might be, although by the time the meal is over and he's making espresso, she's privately diagnosed him with unmedicated ADHD - which, she supposes, might explain a lot. 

So far, at least, she thinks she genuinely likes Pepper (who insisted on first-names within two seconds of sitting down). And she handles being totally at sea in a technical conversation really well. You wouldn't even know she was totally at sea if you weren't looking for it. Betty's just always looking for it, partly because a lot of people in her field or any of the adjacent fields don't look for it, don't notice it, and leave every non-STEM person at a given table lost and uncomfortable. 

Pepper's apparently mastered the art of looking interested and like she's following while also keeping an eye on the flood of words to find places she might be able to secure a metaphorical lifeline, while at the _same time_ being completely unfussed about being lost in the middle of it all. Most people manage two out of three at best, and often only one. 

Agent Barton disappears almost immediately after dinner, but Agent Romanoff stays for a while and after about ten minutes of conversation tells Betty to call her "Natasha", which means that Betty nixes "Dr Ross" in favour of "Betty".

However, as well as not being _as_ aggravating as she'd expected, Tony Stark also turns out to be extremely good at talking people into things. Before the coffee's finished Betty's had to catch herself twice to keep from agreeing to stay on retainer and develop . . . she's not even sure what, quite, but something to do with clean energy generation. 

She manages to keep her commitment to the level of "I'll think about it." Pepper gives her a lot of knowing looks.

Natasha somehow manages to disappear quietly during one of Tony's long, earnest attempts at explaining why she wants to embark on a three year plan of bio-tech development with Stark Industries. She's there one moment, and then the next time Betty's surfaced enough from how fascinating and amazing it (to be totally honest) does sound as a plan, the SHIELD agent's gone. 

Shortly after that, Pepper calls an apologetic (to Betty and Bruce) but firm (to Tony) halt, reminding Tony that he has an 8 am meeting the next morning that he _will_ be attending even if they have to relocate the conference cameras and speakers into the bedroom and he does it in his boxers. While Betty attempts not to laugh too much at that, Pepper goes on, "I'm assuming Natasha hasn't actually parked you in any hotel anywhere already." 

"No," Betty says realizing as she does so the other reason she's giddy, the one she hasn't actually thought about: it's been roughly twenty four hours since she walked into Natasha sitting in her office, and those twenty four hours have had maybe three hours of sleep, and have been . . . one thing after another. She should probably be grateful she's not giggling like a sixteen year old idiot. 

"I mean, I don't want - " she starts to add, but Pepper waves it off.

"We have a _lot_ of guest rooms, trust me," she says. "And if Natasha hasn't explicitly already settled somewhere else, she intended to stay here. She has an open invitation." 

"If she'll just stop being paranoid and indecisive, she'll have a floor," Tony clarifies. 

"Tony," Pepper says, the warning note in her voice implying that they've had this conversation before. 

"I mean it could be worse, it could be Rogers," Tony goes on, pretending that he didn't hear her. Pepper rolls her eyes. "But that's besides the point," he goes yet further on, leading Betty to wonder what the point actually is. He's been fiddling with something too small to be a smartphone, and says, "Yeah there's a room already made up, all the stuff they got out of Natasha's care including . . .a cat, apparently." 

Betty pointedly ignores Bruce's slight wince. "Yes," she says. "I adopted a cat last year." 

"Well according to the log his litter-box is all set up and he's hiding under your bed," Tony tells her cheerfully. "You're on the guest floor, JARVIS can - " 

"I know where it is," Bruce interrupts, in the way that's an assurance instead of an objection. "I can show her."

As she stands up, Betty says, "Thank you for dinner, and the wine, and I'm sorry for . . ." she hesitates. "All the . . ." and now she sort of gestures inarticulately to the entire idea of showing up on their metaphorical and literal doorstep and crashing their meal and . . .everything. 

"Please," Pepper says, with a half-smile. "I promise you're the best unexpected interruption I've had this week and you have nothing to apologize for." 

Betty thinks she sees Tony starting to take a breath to say something, and also that she sees Pepper stepping hard on his foot. She just squeezes Pepper's offered hand and steps into the elevator with Bruce.

*****

"What?" Tony demands, aggrieved, the moment the elevator doors close. "What was that foot-stomping for?"

Pepper almost snaps at him, not so much because she's actually angry as because the sudden snap of the precarious balance of tension around Bruce and Betty, now that they're gone, leaves her almost breathless. 

No. That's not right. It's not actually tension. Tension is wound up, tight, small and strained. What went out of the room with Betty and Bruce was something more like a suspended breath, like the inhale of a breath that just stops instead of being held. 

But it still snaps, and Tony's question jars hard against the moment of it snapping and so she's spun around before she gets a handle on the snap she doesn't want to snap. Tony still catches the edge of it, and turns the aggrieved up another half notch. 

Pepper sighs. "The last thing either of them needs right now is you being Helpful," she says. "Or funny." 

Tony waves that away. "He's fine," he says and Pepper puts a hand to her face. "He is," Tony insists. "As much as I hate saying it, Romanoff knows what she's doing, and she skipped right over the bit where he'd have any time to screw himself up. Now she's here and he just has to deal with it and he won't be able to convince himself of any of his bullshit." 

"How is it," Pepper demands, "that you can be _so perceptive_ , and yet such a jerk sometimes?" 

She does have to admit he's probably right. It tracks with what she's seen of Bruce, anyway. 

"Laziness?" Tony suggests, and then he asks, "Any wine left?" 

Pepper considers, pours herself a generous glass and then hands him the decanter before going to sit on the couch. Tony manages about a third of a glass before the decanter's empty, and gives her a Look. 

"Wine hog," he tells her, mock-serious. 

"Let's call it fair trade for the part where I get to have the meetings with the damn mayor," Pepper retorts, and Tony pauses. 

"Okay fair deal," he admits readily, and drops down onto the couch beside her without actually managing to spill either of their glasses. "I think it's good," he says, apropos of nothing. "I mean I think it'll be good for him." 

Pepper leans her head on his shoulder and doesn't bother replying out loud.

*****

She's wearing the same perfume and uses the same shampoo and Bruce kind of wants to find Natasha, wherever she is, and strangle her to death.

Except for the part where he doesn't. 

There's a lot in his head to deal with right now. 

He's spent the last . . .how long? too long, anyway, trying not to think about Betty. He's sort of known where she is, in that if something were to happen to her, it'd be on the news somewhere and he's kept up with that. But he got the necklace back, and sent it, and then moved on. Tried to move on. 

Tried not to think about it, or her, or anything. Especially after finding out that suicide literally wasn't an option. And part of forgetting, part of not thinking, was knowing that this was the best way. The best option. Best for her. 

Bruce isn't stupid. He's more than capable of translating from Natasha's pseudo-polite wording to what she's actually trying to say, and what she actually said, back there before dinner, was _you're a fucking moron, and I knew you'd be a fucking moron over this, so I dropped it in your lap with no warning to keep you from doing something fucking stupid. You're welcome._

He _hates_ that she's right. One hundred percent, absolutely, completely right. It's infuriating, and the thing where a large part of him is desperately desperately grateful for it _doesn't help_. 

After the elevators close and Tony and Pepper can't hear anymore unless they are secretly violating privacy left right and centre, Bruce clears his throat and asks, "So how hard are you working to keep from ripping twelve strips off me for disappearing on you and never contacting you or sending you any sign except the necklace?" 

Because he knows she's angry. He can feel it, could feel it in the way she held on and can still feel it now, like it's radiating off her skin. A lot of people who know her think Betty doesn't get angry often, but she's actually angry a reasonable proportion of the time. She just doesn't show it, and she doesn't act out of it. That doesn't mean it's not there. 

Right now, Bruce can read the anger like bold-font eighty-point text written all over her, even though a lot of people might not. He knows her. 

Fuck, he missed this. 

"I'm trying not to wreck the moment," she says, a mix of bland and wry that makes Bruce need to suppress his smile and look down for a second. "But I could yell if you want," Betty adds, as the elevator slows and stops, and the doors slide open again. 

"I think we can pass," Bruce says - mostly because she feels like crap after she's yelled and shouted at or about someone, even if she needs it. And then, gesturing to the right down the hall, he says, "I'm sorry." 

It's not enough. It's sincere, but it's not even remotely enough. The trouble is there's . . .not much else. What else could there be?

He could explain, but explanations aren't justifications, and besides, she knows the explanations already. Just like he would, vice versa, and just like he knows why she's here. He could go on about being sorry, but it'd seem fake, because neither of them is like that. 

So he just says, _I'm sorry_ , and leaves it. 

"Where were you?" she asks, as he gestures to the door that has the suite-name either Tony or JARVIS had sent to his phone. (Aspen. Bruce isn't sure if Tony even had anything to do with the suite names.) 

"It'll recognize your face," Bruce says, pointing to the dark pane of glass beside the door. "But not mine, unless you add me." Betty shoots him a slightly perturbed look, but takes the handle and pushes the door open. 

The guest suites push the definition: they're honestly more or less luxury condos, and Bruce gives Betty the few seconds she's going to need to stare around and then make herself stop staring. Like most of them the entrance opens into the open-plan kitchen-and-dining-room, with the other doors further back and the living-room over to the right. 

"I was in Canada," he says, stepping past her to go sit in one of the chairs at the table. "I went back to Brazil for a while. Colombia. India." 

"We always said we'd go to India," Betty says, and Bruce winces. Doesn't bother hiding it. 

"It wasn't really a good time," he says quietly, as she comes to sit down in one of the other chairs, around the corner of the table. "I wasn't . . . my head wasn't really on well for a while."

Betty looks at him with the solemn face that means she's thinking of a way to go forward with the conversation that doesn't mean just jumping right into a fight. After a moment she says, "Thank you for getting my necklace back."

And then, "You could have found a way to let me know you were okay."

Bruce looks down at his hands. "I know." And he doesn't really have anything good to follow that up with either. He could have, and he didn't: that's kind of all there is to it. He'd had reasons, or at least thought he'd had reasons, thought they were good reasons, but right now - 

He's not sure which is going to be harder to handle, Natasha or Tony. Because Natasha, he's pretty sure, is never going to bring this up again, is just going to go straight forward from here as if there's nothing to bring up. 

And Tony's going to be smug, even if he doesn't say anything. Even though Bruce is absolutely dead sure he had absolutely nothing to do with this, so he has nothing to be smug about. 

Pepper's going to be sympathetic, probably, and Bruce would be lying if he said he didn't kind of appreciate that at least someone will. 

Betty folds her arms, or maybe that's what she thinks she's doing, but it's more like she's wrapping them around herself. She swallows and says, "You're not going to tell me you did it for my own good?" in a mock-casual-almost-cheerful tone that makes him wince again, outright. 

"Well," he says, "that is what I was thinking at the time, but I can't see it being anything but really, really stupid to say now."

Betty glances away over his shoulder and then back, the kind of flick of the gaze that happens when you're pretending your eyes aren't starting to fill. "It was stupid _then_ ," she says, quiet and firm, leaning on the last word. 

"Granted," Bruce replies, as measured as he can, "but it would be stupider now, right?"

Betty blinks her eyes quickly, obviously to get rid of the wetness that's making them glitter, and her voice is a little less steady when she says, "I missed you. And I really, _really_ worried about you."

Bruce should probably feel overwrought and overwhelmed and on the edge of some kind of loss of emotional control but mostly he feels . . .well he feels bad, and guilty because she's crying, but - 

A few days ago - maybe more than a few, now - Tony'd done that thing where he managed to work the conversation around to how Bruce shouldn't leave yet, even though Bruce was planning to pack up and catch a bus in a day or two. Tony never broached the subject head on. Somehow he just . . .finangled things around until _Bruce_ is the one who somehow brings it up directly. It's irritating as hell. 

Someone as bad with people as Tony Stark should not be so unexpectedly good with people. 

_Here's a question,_ Tony'd said. _So accepting the idea that you're irreparably dangerous - I don't, but even so - and accepting the idea that this is a problem, why exactly - like, exactly - do you actually think that running around hiding and ripping out any and all roots you might grow and constantly undermining yourself is the best way to deal with it?_

Bruce had stared at him. Tony'd blithely gone on as if he'd just asked about the weather, adding, _I mean I'm not an expert but I know a_ little _about this shit just from, you know, certain kinds of life experience and I can tell you_ pretty confidently _that this is basically the opposite of how to foster mental health and stability and impulse control and all those things that are probably important if you're not wanting to suddenly turn into a killer green rage-monster. I mean I'm just saying, I think they've done some studies here._

After Bruce hadn't had an answer that didn't involve _fuck you, you glib hypocritical son of a bitch_ \- and it wasn't even quite fair, because Tony wasn't really being a hypocrite right then - and the silence had gone on a couple seconds, Tony'd blithely changed directions completely and asked him what he thought about the new receptors on the satellite they'd been redesigning. 

Bruce doesn't _quite_ believe in any kind of intelligence or will driving the events of the universe, but looking at Betty in front of him and remembering that conversation, he's really tempted, just so he'll have something to blame. And to blame for the reason he mostly feels like someone who's spent two days on a mandala, only to have a windstorm come and wipe it off the floor, and who also knows that's kind of the point. 

Plus, okay, guilty because Betty's trying not to cry. 

He clears his throat. "If it helps," he says, "I think by this point we've firmly established that I'm next to invulnerable. I mean after the big space monster thing and the being hit with like twenty laser cannons all at once, plus, you wouldn't've seen this, but empirical trial also suggests that if you shot me in the head, the Other Guy'd just . . .give you the bullet back. Via a fist." 

She's started a sort of gurgling laugh by the time he's saying _space monster_ , and having to try really hard to choke it down enough to say, "Jerk," after he's finished. 

He reaches over to touch her cheek, and she catches his hand as he lets it fall, like he meant her to. 

"I was really, really happy to see you," he says, and she laughs again, less choking and a bit more knowing this time.

"Liar," she says, and he smiles, even if it's a bit twisted. 

"Okay," he admits, "I was happy after the few seconds of total abject panic and the momentary desire to chuck Natasha out the window."

"I heard you beat up a god," Betty says, groping for the same tone he's got, and probably having the same hard time of it. 

For no real reason, Bruce remembers there's a cat somewhere in this suite. 

"That, I really wish I could remember clearly," Bruce replies, and he is completely honest on that one. He's also sad he didn't beat the so-called god up _harder_ , though in any reasonable world smashing him over and over and leaving him stuck in _marble floor_ should've been enough to kill anyone. 

Not Asgardians, apparently. 

He really should've hit the son of a bitch harder. 

Betty's hand is still in his and she leans forward to kiss him on the cheek. He rests the other hand against her hair, holding her there. 

"I'm not afraid of you," she says, resting her forehead against his, and Bruce sighs.

That, at least, she's _comprehensively_ demonstrated. He doesn't remember the suppression attempt in Stearns' lab, but he does remember nearly shitting himself when she told him about how she was working to keep him calm. 

Crazy goddamn woman.

"I know," he tells her. "And that scares the shit out of me." 

Betty squeezes his hand and sits up, remembering, and reaches into her bra to pull out a drawstring bag. She hands it to him; he undoes the strings and looks blankly for a second at the flash-drives inside before it makes sense. 

"How many copies did you keep?" he asks, slightly incredulous.

"Two," Betty says. "The one from before, and then this . . .set, I guess. There's only pieces on each one," she explains, "and it's hiding in, well - " she coughs. "Porn. Basically the most . . .interesting porn I could stand to download." 

It takes Bruce at least a full minute to get a grip on the helpless laughter, while Betty pretends that she's not blushing. 

"I love you," he says, honestly. He doesn't really have anything else to say. There really isn't another reaction to that, if you're him, and she's who she is. 

She looks at him and says, almost hesitantly, "Bruce, we are in . . .the best research and technology facility in North America. Probably in the world. And apparently you've managed to make Tony Stark like you so much he's totally sanguine about your old girlfriend appearing randomly for dinner." 

"Betty - " he starts to object and she waves him off. 

"You know what I'm trying to say, Bruce," she says. "As far as I can see we couldn't be in a better position to try and figure this shit out," and she gestures at the bag, "and this time not . . .clandestine, not under the table with some asshole who only knows you as a code name, but _us_. We have everything we could possibly have and I _missed you_ and I hate living without you. It's miserable and I'm lonely and I'm so lonely I adopted a cat. And you probably _should've_ adopted a cat, but I know you, you didn't, you probably made yourself leave every time people started making you feel at home." 

Bruce has to look down at their hands for a second. Betty says, "And that's a stupid way to live." 

He looks up at her again and she says, "We got invaded by aliens. Through a wormhole. At this point I have to think just about anything's possible." 

Bruce can't really think of a way to answer that. Not coherently. So he just pulls her over to his lap instead, wrapping both arms around her and resting his face against her neck. 

Betty's hands close in his shirt, and they stay like that for a while.

*****

It's halfway through the meal when suddenly Clint can't cope with this many people anymore. Given there's only six people, counting him along with everyone else, that's pretty fucking sad - but he's been here before, so to speak, and knows whatever's starting to wind itself up doesn't care, it just cares that six people is too many to track _perfectly_ without being in full Alert all the time, and since he refuses to be in full Alert, six people is too many people.

He hangs on until dessert's finished and people are moving to have coffee on couches instead of at the table, and then gets lost. 

The advantage of Stark Tower is that there's a lot of Up, and while it's not necessarily a great thing that enough of nearby New York is still in enough rubble to give him a really good view of the surround, it's at least a calming sight. 

For him. 

And the other advantage of Stark Tower right _now_ is that a good half of the top of it is still open struts and scaffolding that lets him actually climb up to more or less the absolute top and then settle with one leg hanging down and his back against a support, his arm resting on his knee. 

And there really isn't anything obstructing his view of the whole city, but that's only about half of why he feels better up here. He's never really pinned down the other half. 

He doesn't have his bow but that's probably all to the good, really: less temptation to let paranoia turn into action when his only weapon is his last-resort gun, which Stark's security people were polite and intelligent enough not to try to take off him. Tasha's right, in that he's more than good enough with it to have pasted Fury's brains all over the wall with his P30 if he'd decided to, but that doesn't mean he likes the gun much.

Clint's never liked guns that much, however good he got with them. It's an absurd and almost childish kind of thing, but guns are loud and abrupt and violent, compared to just about any other way of killing people. Meaningless distinction: there's no difference to the guy with a hole punched through him whether a bullet did it or an arrow. But everyone's got their quirks, and that's one of his. 

He watches the light-play of the cars down below, and after trying to think about something else for almost ten minutes straight, gives up and starts niggling at the memory just out of his reach. The one that's been digging hooks into his brain all day, all week, and the echoes just out of reach driving up the tension until he had to leave. Can't deal with people. 

It's not going away; he might as well figure out what the fuck it is. 

Tasha finds him about an hour later. Or better to say she climbs up to join him an hour later, seeing as she probably always knew where to find him. 

As he waits for her, Clint takes a moment to admire how she casually makes her way across spaces, between supports, and at heights that would have any sane person sweating and clinging to whatever stayed under their feet - or possibly more relevantly would keep any sane person from trying to come out here at all.

He bites back the words _have I mentioned that not killing you is the best call I ever made in my life?_ on the basis that if he says that out loud, she might put him under psych observation for the next month. It's just possible she should anyway, but it doesn't sound like his idea of fun, so he'll avoid it if he can. 

Instead, he calls out, "So, what odds you got on getting a chance to test your theory about Ross by the end of tonight?" which, seeing as it's a direct prod to the thing that's eating at her, is probably not a much better idea.

Fuck knows he's not really heir to a lot of good ideas right now. 

"You noticed too, then," Tasha replies, sitting down beside him on the support and looking out over broken buildings and construction cranes. She means the moment Ross's posture and tells went from anxious and relieved to sitting on anger. "I wondered what that effect would be."

"Yeah, well, what would you do if I disappeared on you 'for your own good'?" Clint asks, dry, and Tasha laughs. She gives him a sardonic look. 

"Well," she says, "I'd probably start with breaking every bow you own into two inch pieces - "

"Right," he says. After a pause he adds, "So don't you ever do it either," and earns himself the _Barton, do you need to get your fucking head examined?_ expression. 

It's fair: Natasha's biggest objection to the whole idea, no matter who's doing it or thinking about it, is that it never works, and it's actually the stupidest and most risky option because it means the person you're worried about is out of your sight and doing fuck knows what, which is guaranteed to be less safety-conscious and security-aware than it would be if she were to be herding them every step of the way. 

It also makes him look away, pretending to take in the view; he asks, "What does it remind you of?" to fill up the silence and maybe deflect a question or two. Or an appraising look.

"Sarajevo," she says, after a minute. Her voice is distant.

Clint doesn't say anything; Sarajevo is another one of those times where he knows what it's left her with, but he doesn't know exactly what happened. And that brings him back to the memory in the murk and words that stick.

Tasha lets him get away with that for about five minutes before she says, "Well?" and she's waiting, and he still can't be sure of everything that sits under _I've been compromised_ , but he thinks he knows part of it.

And if he tries to duck, she's just going to pin him down anyway. 

So he says, "I told him everything about you, didn't I."

He can't actually remember, and he wonders if it's something like cowardice that he's kind of glad - but he has something like the memory of a memory, the knowledge that once he knew things and the shape of what he knew.

Plus he's not fucking stupid. 

Tasha says, her voice totally even and calm, "Probably. He made you tell him a lot, anyway."

"Fuck," Clint says, softly. Louder he says, "I'm sorry." And under the words he's just blank. 

"You didn't have a choice," Tasha replies, absolution so easy it bothers him, except he can't think of what else she could say. 

She considers him for a few seconds, head tilted, before going on, "I'm not really worried about it, Clint." Her voice is still calm and he looks at her hard, but he can't see anything else in her face or her body, either. Can't see any tells, any indication it's a lie.

But she's had a long time to learn how to lie to him. 

"Why not?" he asks, the challenge flat. And Tasha smiles, the cold, hard-edged smile that marks never see and that she's had since long before she was old enough for it to be fair that she did. 

Fair to her. 

"We're talking about someone who thought killing his brother and committing genocide would make his adopted father love him more," she says. "Someone who's completely hung up on ruling _Earth_ , this planet, and thinks being scary and killing people a lot would let him do that. Jesus, Clint," she says, this time her voice laced through with a derisive laugh, "we're talking about someone who thinks that just because you can put someone on their knees means you actually fucking control them. That the minute you turn your back there _won't_ be someone waiting to bury a knife in it up to the hilt." 

She snorts, and adds, "Forget ruling the mess he came from. It takes five minutes talking to Thor to figure out there isn't a single fucking Asgardian who'd knowingly follow Loki to find a toilet, let alone anything else." 

The smile comes back, sharper this time and she meets Clint's eyes when she says, "We're talking about someone who thought he could scare me and hurt me, and that scaring me and hurting me would make one God-damn bit of difference. I'm not really worried what he knows about me, Barton. I'm more than a bit beyond him."

She's talking about the guy who emptied Clint out of his own head and poured himself in, who scares Clint enough that he has to hate the guy just to have a wall to put up, and Clint still believes her. 

"I love you," he says, because he's always been an idiot, and also because the other words he could come up with right now are lies. And he's too tired to lie.

This smile doesn't have any edges except the one Natalia Romanova couldn't be herself without, and she runs fingers once through his hair.

"I know," she says. And adds, "There's some footage off the carrier I want you to watch, assuming it survived. I think it might help."

"It's amazing," Clint says, striving for something like a normal tone, "how you can get used to being recorded all the time."

"It has its uses," Tasha replies. "We confiscated a camera off a reporter that has a really good shot of your arrow blowing Loki into the tower."

"I think I want a copy of that," he says. Lets the serve and strike of normal back and forth move them away from everything either of them just said. "What all did we confiscate, anyway?"

"Anything that got a clear picture of faces - yours, mine, Rogers', Banner's." She shrugs. "Left Stark and Thor clear, since you can't even fucking hope to disguise them anyway." 

"What did Fury do about the staff at the shawarma place? I still can't believe Stark actually talked us into that." And Clint can't. Well, he can, because he _did,_ , but -

"Never doubt Stark's ability to persuade," Tasha says, in a slightly dire voice. "I think Fury hired one of them and bought off the others," she goes on, actually answering him. "The lady who owns the place still insists on feeding me if she sees me going by." 

Then she says, "Come down and go to bed. It's getting cold up here."

And she's right.

*****

Paranoia is defined by irrational or unwarranted beliefs. As such it isn't paranoia that keeps Natalia awake about an hour after Clint falls asleep beside her, lying on his back with one hand up under the pillow and the other resting on his chest, while she reads a book.

It's reasonable concern. Natalia's got plenty of reasons, and her concern is perfectly goddamn warranted. 

By about an hour later, though, the balance of probability is that if there were going to be an explosion, it would have happened by now. So Natalia relaxes, closes the book, leans back into the pillows and lets herself drift into the kind of sleep that evaporates at the least excuse.

She'll finish making friends with Elizabeth Ross in the morning. She'll have time.

**Author's Note:**

> Things about rewrite: 
> 
> \- while the actual slot for the previous fic still exists, it does so locked to AO3 users and disconnected from the series, and basically as a redirect for bookmarks. 
> 
> \- no, the previous version is not available, as this is my preferred version (even if I have now made you hate it: sorry! but that's how it is). If you have a saved copy of the old one please keep it to yourself and do not distribute, because that would be a rude, dick-face thing to do. 
> 
> \- the actual events of the story remain the same, as does the point and general thrust; the editing is like 100% for me because in 2012 when I was mildly irked about the disappearance of Betty Ross and had a brief bunny on how to bring her back, I of course had no idea that in 2014 my entire soul was going to get EATEN (and also that Natasha's characterisation thru _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ would alter sufficiently to make some of the stuff I was here extrapolating solely from _Avengers_ hit wrong notes for me much later on), to deal with minor continuity errors and characterisation blips that are kind of inevitable when you have no idea that your brain is going to use this as a foundation to build an entire structure of millions of words about intense psychological recovery with way more effort put into the worldbuilding than I ever did in 2012.
> 
> tl;dr: if you're NOT the kind of person who actually remembers and correlates minute details on that scale, the rewrite is honestly totally irrelevant! I just am that person (am I ever that person). And it was bugging me. _A lot_. I notice when the offhand lazy implications of my 2012 "whatever let's get a fic up" worldbuilding clash with the thought I actually put into it later. And it's my fic-verse which I do entirely to make myself happy, so I figured I'd just spend a few (thousand) words and few (dozen) hours fixing it so it didn't bug me anymore. 
> 
> \- I think that is all. <3 Thank you to all my lovely readers for reading, period. You are indeed lovely.


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